Wry rather than out-loud funny, laced with melancholy and angst, this book is an enviable first effort.
Like many teenagers, Emily Vidal believes her life sucks. That Emily is conscious of her own foibles gives this coming-of-age debut novel a measure of depth. And then there are Emily's sardonic observations of the wealthy denizens of suburban Connecticut.
The book opens with 14-year-old Emily at her father's 50th birthday party. The usual teenage snarkiness is checked when she discovers her father in a passionate embrace with Mrs. Resnick, the next-door neighbor. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Resnick commits suicide, a hanging Emily observes but cannot prevent. The situation grows more confusing when Mrs. Resnick turns up pregnant. Emily's parents divorce, her father follows his work to Prague and Emily is left with her detached mother and an overweening conception of her own maturity. Before she understands the sharp edges of passion, Emily finds herself, seduced and seducer, in a love affair with Mr. Basketball, her teacher, a dalliance that will continue intermittently over a decade. Emily conquers college, about which little is said, and then moves to Prague for graduate work in interior design. There she lives with her father, meets again with her lover and connects with her half sister. Next it's Brooklyn, where Emily finds a new love and begins her career, only to be confronted again by a guilt-ridden Mr. Basketball, now a widowed lawyer. The story weaves toward its conclusion when Emily's father returns to Connecticut ill with lung cancer. Espach's writing is literary and introspective, sometimes indulging in irony circling upon irony, but it’s securely grounded in a sense of place. Even when the story moves to Prague, settings resonate with authenticity. With rare exceptions, the cast of characters, from fellow students to expats in Prague to the post-yuppies of Connecticut, are well-studied.
Wry rather than out-loud funny, laced with melancholy and angst, this book is an enviable first effort.Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9185-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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