Second-novelist Parsons (Leaving Disneyland, 2001) unnecessarily overloads the scales: His sensitive evocation of historical...
War, dispossession and atomic fallout afflict a decent ranching family in 1940s New Mexico.
“Seems like we was bred for bad luck,” Ross Strickland comments—justifiably, although neither he nor his less taciturn brother Baylis initially grasps the magnitude of ruin bearing down on them and their Bar-X ranch. First, Ross’s son Jack enlists and is reported dead fighting in the Philippines. Then the War Department claims their land for a bombing range, expunging years of toil and investment. As the ordered universe implodes, so the Stricklands’ moral compass starts to fail. A feud with reprobate brothers Wink and Napoleon Seery, the Stricklands’ dark opposites, turns violent: Wink’s innocent son Felix is wounded, and then Ross guns down Napoleon in a claimed act of self-defense. But it is Jack, not dead but a prisoner of the Japanese, who is punished most harshly. Malnutrition, beatings, torture and wholesale slaughter are commonplace in the slave labor camps, which reduce him and his peers to their most atavistic selves. Jack finds camaraderie and survivor wisdom among Mexicans, Native Indians and other underdogs. “Maybe it’s better you don’t think about justice,” one sagely advises. Both Jack and Baylis witness the blistering flash of an atomic bomb detonation: Jack near Tokyo, his uncle close to Bar-X land. With Ross in prison and the family scattered, Baylis’s marriage falls apart, and the succor of a brief affair with his sister-in-law turns to corrosive guilt once Ross is released. Jack returns from the dead, a mere skeleton of himself, haunted by anger and more guilt. Ross’s hopes for the ranch are dashed when the War Office denies restitution of their land, and he dies in a car crash. This final blow irretrievably crushes Baylis, leaving to disfigured Felix and scarred Jack the burden of rediscovering a purpose.
Second-novelist Parsons (Leaving Disneyland, 2001) unnecessarily overloads the scales: His sensitive evocation of historical atrocities and a scouring way of life would be affecting enough without the pile-up of misery.Pub Date: May 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-51244-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an...
True love flares between two people, but they find that circumstances always impede it.
On a winter day in London, Laurie spots Jack from her bus home and he sparks a feeling in her so deep that she spends the next year searching for him. Her roommate and best friend, Sarah, is the perfect wing-woman but ultimately—and unknowingly—ends the search by finding Jack and falling for him herself. Laurie’s hasty decision not to tell Sarah is the second painful missed opportunity (after not getting off the bus), but Sarah’s happiness is so important to Laurie that she dedicates ample energy into retraining her heart not to love Jack. Laurie is misguided, but her effort and loyalty spring from a true heart, and she considers her project mostly successful. Perhaps she would have total success, but the fact of the matter is that Jack feels the same deep connection to Laurie. His reasons for not acting on them are less admirable: He likes Sarah and she’s the total package; why would he give that up just because every time he and Laurie have enough time together (and just enough alcohol) they nearly fall into each other’s arms? Laurie finally begins to move on, creating a mostly satisfying life for herself, whereas Jack’s inability to be genuine tortures him and turns him into an ever bigger jerk. Patriarchy—it hurts men, too! There’s no question where the book is going, but the pacing is just right, the tone warm, and the characters sympathetic, even when making dumb decisions.
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an emotional, satisfying read.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-57468-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Not for the faint of heart, perhaps, but an ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.
Violent, often surrealistic Wild West yarn, Cormac McCarthy by way of Gabriel García Márquez.
Håkan Söderström is a force of nature, a wild giant whose name, in the frontier America in which he has landed, is rendered as the Hawk. On the docks back in Gothenburg he was separated from his brother, Linus, and he has sworn to find him in a land so big he can scarcely comprehend it. The Hawk lands in California and ventures eastward only to find himself in all kinds of odd company—crooks, con men, prophets, and the rare honest man—and a tide of history that keeps pushing him back to the west. Along the way, his exploits, literary scholar Diaz (Hispanic Institute/Columbia Univ.; Borges, Between History and Eternity, 2012) writes, are so numerous that he has become a legend in a frontier full of them; for one thing, says an awe-struck traveler, “He was offered his own territory by the Union, like a state, with his own laws and all. Just to keep him away.” The Hawk protests that most of what has been said about him is untrue—but not all of it. As Diaz, who delights in playful language, lists, and stream-of-consciousness prose, reconstructs his adventures, he evokes the multicultural nature of westward expansion, in which immigrants did the bulk of the hard labor and suffered the gravest dangers. One fine set piece is a version of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which religious fanatics dressed as Indians attack a pioneer party—save that in Diaz’s version, Håkan tears his way across the enemy force with a righteous fury befitting an avenging angel. “He knew he had killed and maimed several men,” Diaz writes, memorably, “but what remained most vividly in his mind was the feeling of sorrow and senselessness that came with each act: those worth defending were already dead, and each of his killings made his own struggle for self-preservation less justifiable.”
Not for the faint of heart, perhaps, but an ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56689-488-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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