Devilishly sharp social commentary.
An eccentric outsider is baffled by contemporary Manhattan in this engrossing second novel by Pelzman (Troika, 2014).
Robert Walser is a struggling writer whose genteel ways suit a bygone age. He lives on the Upper West Side, supported by a dwindling inheritance, clinging to the hope that his work will be published. Besides his agent, Belinda St. Clair, “a sour but persistent old woman,” Walser has only one other important contact—Rose—a woman with whom he has exchanged letters but never met. The novel’s opening finds the protagonist in high spirits, having received two important messages—the first from Belinda informing him that his short story is being considered by a literary journal, the second from Rose, announcing her imminent arrival in New York. The storyline follows Walser on his walk from his 72nd Street apartment to the Port Authority, where Rose will alight a bus from Philadelphia. Sadly, Rose fails to show, and Walser’s heart sinks as he realizes that he must continue to navigate the unforgiving city alone. Meanwhile, he discovers that a sculpture is being erected near his apartment that embodies all he despises about contemporary city life. Pelzman’s second novel brims with intrigue. Does the enigmatic Rose exist? What is the significance of the sculpture titled #dunamisto? Pelzman’s reveal is tantalizing and richly detailed. Many of the scenes that define Walser’s character will live on in the memory. One such is when he rides the subway and confronts a young man for failing to give up his seat to the elderly: “I await a humane response, but instead he shrugs his shoulders, returns the headphones to his ears and taps away at the screen of his phone as if he exists on a planet of one.” Walser’s old-fashioned set of values—which may appear priggish but are founded on human decency—cause him to be looked upon as potentially insane. This is acutely observant, timely writing that confronts the ever heightening sense of disconnection and self-absorption extant in city life. A minor criticism: The narrative could be distilled from novel length into an even more intense short story. Walser’s jury duty, for instance; although amusing, it feels somewhat extraneous. Still, this is another entrancing, deeply memorable offering from Pelzman.
Devilishly sharp social commentary.Pub Date: July 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73325-853-1
Page Count: 201
Publisher: Jackson Heights Press
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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