Four precise, elegant novellas, depicting, with wit and anger, the efforts of beleaguered Jews to come to an understanding with a hostile Gentile world. Isler (Kraven Images, 1996, etc.) has a remarkable gift for catching the small telling details of a character and for creating intelligent, distinctive voices. In ``The Monster,'' set in the Jewish ghetto in 16th-century Venice, an aged, unnamed moneylender recollects his disastrous attempt to recover the money lent an Italian nobleman, and his inadvertent part in the death of Mostrino, a hulking though harmless misshapen orphan jokingly identified, with disastrous consequences, as a golem—a legendary defender of the ghetto. We gradually realize that the narrator is in fact Shakespeare's ``Merchant of Venice,'' and that we are hearing, at last, the merchant's own view of events. In the title story, Cardoza, a maker of superb violins, an uneasy resident of England in the 18th century, describes his long affair with the Gentile girl he had sheltered from an abusive father. She becomes first his housekeeper, then his lover, and, over the course of several decades, his great solace. In the wake of her death Cardoza muses, believably and with a moving, muted passion, on his life. ``The Crossing'' follows the bitter education of young David Gladstone during a sea voyage to America in the company of such luminaries as Oscar Wilde. David discovers that his intelligence, his elegant precision of speech and manner, count for little in a world that sees him as a dangerous alien. ``The Affair,'' a funny, unsparing tale set in contemporary New York, describes the horrified reaction of an actor to a friend's production of ``Dreyfus: The Musical.'' By turns angry, deeply inventive, and unsettling, these novellas are a penetrating and original meditation on the vexed question of identity and a pointed reminder that Isler is swiftly becoming a writer of very considerable powers. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-670-87407-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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