Brilliantly observed first novel about the fascination that brings Americans and Japanese together—and the xenophobia that drives them apart. Toshi, from the majestic northern island of Hokkaido, was nine when his soon-to-be-separated mother took him to see Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. From then on, he was entranced by foreigners—so open and free compared to his own repressed, unhappy family and nation. Brown exuberantly describes Toshi's Candidelike progress in hyperactive, modern-day Tokyo—where pet dogs can be rented (an hour a day per week), the Minister of Agriculture commits ritual suicide on TV, and blimps circle overhead, advertising for a bride for the Crown Prince. When he reaches 23, Toshi has become a boy- toy, seduced by American girls and adored by his best friend, gay advertising executive Paul; and his job as staff artist for a popular comic book, Chocolate Girl, allows him to keep life at a surreal distance. His passivity, however, is increasingly challenged after an affair with his kinky English teacher, Jane, turns scary and violent, his father drops dead coming to visit him, and an earthquake devastates Hokkaido. Against a backdrop of Japan turning furiously anti-American under the specter of US imports, these shocks refocus Toshi on the meaning of his parents' separation. As his father's noodle shop is bulldozed, Toshi's mother reveals that she's actually Korean, kidnapped during the war and gang-raped for weeks by Japanese soldiers and factory workers. Toshi's father was a soldier who came to rape her, then stayed to rescue and marry her, even though she could not love him. After so much surreal comedy, this reversal sweeps through the novel like a tsunami, illuminating the war guilt that lies under Japan's frantic embrace of smiley-face consumerism. In a knowingly sentimental close, Toshi finds love with the right American. And Brown, having handled tragedy, satire, and fine descriptions of rural Japan, doesn't flinch from his final hurdle- -depicting happiness. An impressive debut. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 11, 1996
ISBN: 0-671-52671-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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
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