A lovely, high-lonesome end to Duane’s saga that also offers the possibility of more books to come—which readers will...
Duane Moore’s depressed and a little horny—but not as horny as the black rhinoceroses that have entered his increasingly complicated life.
Now in his late 60s, Duane has been with us since The Last Picture Show (1966). That was many volumes ago, McMurtry (Books: A Memoir, 2008, etc.) being a prolific chap, and Duane has had his ups and downs. This book catches him on a down. His friend Honor sums up his condition philosophically: “Many aging people feel marginal, to some degree. For decades they’re at the center of things, and then one day they’re not. They slip over to the sidelines.” Duane has ample justification for being bummed. His wife, Annie Cameron of the fantastically wealthy Dallas Cameron clan, has some dirty little secrets that unfold across the novel’s pages. The people he has grown up with are leaving the planet. He’s living in Arizona, which makes him an outsider when he returns to the xenophobic little burg of Thalia, Texas. Duane’s not as much of an outsider, however, as is K.K. Slater, another woman from Dallas with fantastic wealth (at least on paper) who has established a vast ranch in order to rescue the African black rhino from extinction. The sight of black rhinos brings out the peckerwoods, guns a-blazing; Satanists and South Africans also figure into the mix, as does an extremely compliant porn star and a few other odd ducks. The narrative gets a little, well, middling toward the middle; a couple of set pieces rely on setups just a little too convenient, even considering the smallness of small-town Texas. However, McMurtry ultimately ties up a whole skein of loose ends neatly, and the book closes lyrically with ineluctable sadness, life being in the end a succession of small tragedies and occasional triumphs.
A lovely, high-lonesome end to Duane’s saga that also offers the possibility of more books to come—which readers will certainly hope McMurtry delivers.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5639-1
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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