Translated here into English for the first time, Yamada, author of over 20 novels, tells a banal story of an insecure Asian woman in love with an alcoholic, and sometimes abusive, African-American man in New York City. Yamada introduces some potentially powerful themes in this book: interracial dating, emotional and physical abuse, addiction, older women who date younger men, homosexuality, what it means to be a parent. But it reads more like a foreigner's idea of that crazy New York scene than an interpretation from someone who really knows the city. She introduces these ideas one after the other, but, for the most part, fails to follow through to any honest revelations. Koko is a beautiful young Japanese woman who works in a Greenwich Village art gallery. It would have been nice if Yamada had fleshed out Koko's background so that her reasons for letting herself get caught up in a relationship with the eternally elusive and intoxicated Rick made more sense. But as it is, readers don't understand why she spends her days cleaning up vomit and taking care of his angry, pubescent son and her nights waiting for the lush to stumble home. In all fairness, Yamada suggests that Koko may delight in the fact that she and Rick aren't on equal terms, and we can't help but notice that she reaches for a gin-and-tonic during periods of emotional stress—but all this is just mentioned in passing. Despite everything, Koko assures herself she's not unhappy, and not until she falls in love with a sweet and generous college student does she dump Rick. Koko isn't big on self-examination, so don't expect her to question the tenderness with which she showers Rick after he bashes her face in, or to wonder why she can't be alone. Trying too hard to be hip yet meaningful, this novel goes on and on and on and never says a thing. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56836-018-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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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