Braver (Divine Sarah, 2004) makes an ambitious attempt to examine how accidents harden into fate and tries to coordinate too...
A second’s inattention changes the shape of a woman’s life.
Claire Andrews is a well-respected van Gogh scholar and newly single university professor. Her life has a predictable pattern: teaching, researching, socializing with a few close friends. If she isn’t exactly going through the motions, she is at the very least treading a well-worn path, but after she strikes and kills a young boy with her car, the comfortable order of her world is permanently altered. Perhaps more disorienting than the accident itself are the responses it elicits. Claire’s university, anxious about bad publicity, wishes her to take a leave; her neighbors cannot meet her eye; and the boy’s family sues for wrongful death. In the midst of her trauma, Claire finds two bright spots: her estranged husband’s unexpectedly loyal response to her grief; and her own newfound curiosity about the last days of van Gogh’s life when he painted Crows Over the Wheatfield. Braver’s novel moves between Claire’s struggle to cope with the disintegration of her personal life in the wake of the accident, and a research trip to France during which she discovers new information about van Gogh. In both narratives, Claire is attuned to the significance of single moments in which the world and our perceptions of it can change in momentous and irreversible ways. Despite the care with which the author alternates between Claire’s scholarly and personal trials, a strategy echoed in the novel’s switching between passages about van Gogh’s trauma and Claire’s suffering, the juxtaposition can be both facile and jarring. The self-discoveries Claire makes in France have a formulaic, scripted quality that makes Claire unlikable and unbelievable. Prone to uttering sophomoric platitudes about art and life, Claire seems more concussed than introspective after her accident, a matter not helped by the stilted quality of the characters’ dialogue.
Braver (Divine Sarah, 2004) makes an ambitious attempt to examine how accidents harden into fate and tries to coordinate too many stories, yet he has no central character strong enough to synthesize them.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-078232-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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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