Not even a last-minute death and the tension of ambiguities—what is Flaca’s real name? who is Soledad’s real father?—are...
A choppy debut from young activist and teacher Cruz attempts to record the Dominican experience in New York City.
Soledad returns to her family’s Washington Heights neighborhood from her downtown art-gallery job when her mother, Olivia, falls mysteriously ill. It’s this illness—Olivia’s already a “living ghost,” living in a state somewhere between depression and coma—that serves as the story’s apparatus of Dominican mysticism: the vehicle on which we will tour “Nueva Yol.” We meet Flaca, Soledad’s slutty teenaged sister, and Richie, a neighborhood tough, then follow the love triangle that ensues among them, the source of what little tension there is. A string of subplots and minor characters follow, including Ciego, the requisite wise blind man, and Toe-Knee, the token non-Dominican (he’s a black drug dealer), but none of them is particularly well-drawn, and there’s no real reason Soledad is the titular character. After things get moving, there’s also a parade of prostitutes and palm readers and magicians with their sauces and specialties, and though we’ve been assured that the ’hood is filled with hoods, Richie turns out to be a talented musician, Soledad an artist, Flaca an undiscovered prodigy, and Ciego an insightful anthropologist—self-taught, of course. This is the world where people literally say “Wassup?” to each other. It’s Do the Right Cosa, and sometimes Cruz’s bleeds into unnecessary Spanish, perhaps there to remind the gringos that folk from D.R. speak a different language, are more than banal: they’re a reminder that the story is ultimately addressed to an audience of blanquitos. The odd moment when Cruz seems to capture genuineness—a man cradles his spittoon in his lap, men play dominos on tables meant for chess—seem accidental in light of the fray of rote narrative choices.
Not even a last-minute death and the tension of ambiguities—what is Flaca’s real name? who is Soledad’s real father?—are enough to redeem this unambitious first effort.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1201-0
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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