Well-written, heartwarming: indeed, a kind of Indian Christmas Carol—but one in which the characterization and story play a...
A provincial Bengali family enters the 21st century, in this earnest story set in Toturpuram, "a squalid little town" on the Bay of Bengal.
Badami's second novel (her first was published in 1996 in Canada, where she now lives) is as much about the everyday difficulties—lack of fresh water, erratic electricity, all-pervasive governmental corruption—of contemporary Indian life as it is about the ostensible plot. The author peppers her narrative with precious anecdotes about the eccentrics who populate Toturpuram: a madwoman who directs traffic half-naked; an ancient exhibitionist dubbed "Chocobar" after his cocoa-hued member; a housewife who snips the ends off her neighbor's drying laundry, and so on. Then there’s Sripathi Rao, a high-caste ad copywriter of a certain age, who fears nothing more than the poverty and chaos that surrounds him. He lives with a pack of characters straight from central casting—pious wife Nirmala, activist son Arun, witchy mother Ammaya, spinster sister Putti—in the rundown mansion built by his dead father. At the start, Sripathi learns that his grown daughter Maya, estranged for nine years after her marriage to an American, has been killed, along with her husband, in a car crash. Sripathi travels to Vancouver and fetches Nandana, Maya's headstrong seven year-old daughter, now rendered mute by the trauma of her parents' death. Accustomed to spotless houses, video games, and sugary breakfast cereals, Nandana reacts badly to the ripe smells and mysterious foods of India. The child's presence, however, offers the prickly, embittered Sripathi, who cut his daughter off without a second thought, a chance to redeem himself, in part by becoming free of antiquated ideas about obligation and etiquette (represented, rather clunkily, by the family's rotting house).
Well-written, heartwarming: indeed, a kind of Indian Christmas Carol—but one in which the characterization and story play a subservient role to the somewhat labored strokes of local color.Pub Date: April 27, 2001
ISBN: 1-56512-312-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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