It’s light on plot, and those grim Chopik academics are close to straw men, but so what? Ziolkowski is off to a fine start.
What to do about Seth? The self-destructive punk roils a Kansas household in this sparkling debut.
Lewis Chopik has come home to Wichita to lick his wounds. The young graduate (Columbia, summa cum laude) should be buoyant, but he’s been dumped by his girlfriend, who’s traded up to snag a Rhodes Scholar. And he’s being badgered by his father Virgil, a Columbia professor and part of a formidable clan of academics, to pursue his studies, an unwelcome prospect. All his divorced mother Abby wants is for him to be happy. However, any hope of peace and quiet back home dissolves when his 20-year-old brother Seth appears. He’s been on a downward spiral since age 14, when a morning-glory trip convinced him death was an attractive destination. Since then he’s been tentatively diagnosed as bipolar; briefly married to a stripper in San Francisco; and almost killed by fellow street punks. He fits right in at Abby’s. His indulgent mom has always provided “havens for oddballs,” while busying herself with New -Age projects and a succession of “lifetime companions.” Her latest companion is unhappily sharing her with Bishop, a genial university chemistry teacher who’s cooking up “designer psychedelics” in Abby’s basement; he’s also helping her set up her latest project: storm-chasing with a New -Age twist. There’s never a dull moment in a novel which fires us up with snappy and often very funny dialogue; Seth, deranged but smart (those Chopik genes), takes down anyone in earshot with gleeful malice. The central relationship is that between the two brothers; Lewis loves Seth dearly but is powerless to slow his descent. They will be ejected from a bowling alley and a biker bar; after Seth’s frightening rant in a graveyard, Lewis realizes he must be committed. Then the whole gang takes off after a tornado—for Seth, the perfect solution.
It’s light on plot, and those grim Chopik academics are close to straw men, but so what? Ziolkowski is off to a fine start.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60945-070-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
