A writer to watch.
Patterned on Ulysses, crammed with an entire liberal arts education, this debut’s vast ambition goes up against Conn’s obvious and genuine talent: against all odds, talent wins.
Benjamin Seymour is in depressive stasis, not quite sleepwalking through an often wonderfully detailed New York City, as he mourns and longs for his lost dead love, Penelope, a love documented in the many pornographic films they made together, she as star, he both in front of and behind the camera. Related in a variety of formal tricks, the novel gives us the real magic of first love, set in a mythic Ithaca, where they both attended Cornell, and a loving history of American porn (inevitably reminiscent of Boogie Nights), culminating in Benjamin's mentor, friend, and Quilty figure, Milton Minegold, a heroic, pathetic, scary Al Goldstein type (Conn includes a number of recognizable satirized figures). While Benjamin's focus on the scatological and masturbatory is not for the squeamish, he's a winning character, a genuine good sort, and when he meets lawyer Katherine Welland, an erotic urge turns into chivalry and he goes on a quest to find her runaway daughter, nine-year-old Finn, as precocious as a Glass but as charming as Eloise, and herself a heroic figure, struggling with incipient adult understandings of the world. Together, Finn and Benjamin go on a transformative metaphorical journey that brings everyone home, Finn to her mother, Benjamin to her mother's bed, and the reader to the Molly Bloom climax. Despite sometimes precious, self-congratulatory prose, smart but easy puns (“The child was jung but not easily freudened”), and a brittle stylistic cleverness (the centerpiece here is a 110-page screenplay of a surreal musical fantasia starting in the Times Square Disney store and continuing through stygian subways), Conn sends us on an engaging, entertaining, funny, and moving trip.
A writer to watch.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-887128-55-7
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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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