Hautman goes head-to-head against Carl Hiassen’s Lucky You with his own hilarious take on the larcenous lemmings that swarm around a lottery winner. Why shouldn’t sweet, tough, innocent Barbaraannette Quinn, the second-grade teacher who for years has been playing permutations of her relatives’ birthdays in Powerball, rake in an $8.9 million windfall? And why shouldn’t she impulsively decide, confronted by TV cameras outside the lottery office, to offer a million-dollar reward for the return of her husband Bobby? After all, Bobby’s not exactly estranged, he’s just been AWOL for six years. And now, living as boot salesman Bobby Steele with voluptuous, good-natured Phlox Anderson in Tucson, he gets wind of his wife’s offer within seconds and decides to turn himself in for the reward, figuring he’ll put off worrying about what he’s going to do about the women in his life till after he’s got the greenbacks in his hand. But more pressing complications ensue. Reaching his hometown of Cold Rock, Minnesota, Bobby’s immediately spotted by ethereally beautiful, deeply sociopathic con man Jayjay Morrow, who’s happy to interrupt his routine of writing lying, cadging letters to celebrities and sponging off his latest admirer, the besotted Professor AndrÇ Gideon, to kidnap Bobby and hold him for ransom. Feisty Barbaraannette, the daughter of Hautman semi-regular Sam O’Gara (The Mortal Nuts, 1996, etc.), doesn’t take this development lying down. And neither does Phlox, or Barbaraannette-smitten bank officer Art Dobbleman, or those Henry High ex-football players Hugh Hulke and Rodney Gent. You can try to imagine what sorts of things happen next, though you’ll be two steps behind Hautman. If Hautman’s line-by-line writing is less joyously baroque than Hiassen’s—and it’s an awfully close race—his powers of invention and dexterity are even greater as he provides delightfully unexpected roles for Jayjay, Phlox, Gideon, and Barbaraannette’s senile mother Hilde Grabo.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-83243-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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