A former member of Manhattan's Wooster Group theater company lightly fictionalizes a scattershot memoir of her West Coast relatives. Rower's disjointed first effort aspires to be a profound commentary on the different lifestyles found on opposite coasts— and yet relies on such insights as ``It's a California thing'' to describe the LA fondness for cars, panic disorders, and security systems. Ann, the narrator, barely disguises her own unpleasant character from the moment she travels to LA for the funeral of her famous uncle, Leo Robin, the Oscar-winning lyricist who also composed Bob Hope's theme song. Over the following years, as she continues to visit the family that Uncle Leo left behindheaded by the wife he married at age 82Ann drools for the family Jaguar, her aunt's diamonds, her uncle's Oscar, and a Henry Miller painting that she does in fact score (``It was all so famous, resonant, and exciting to me''). Ann's greatest transgression, though, becomes apparent in a self-reflexive afterword, where she blithely justifies exploiting her relatives for the sake of art and offers some phony excuses about bettering womankind—including verbatim the suicide note of Uncle Leo's step-granddaughter, an aspiring model in her late 20s who couldn't overcome her debilitating neuroses. Ann's episodic visits west, over a nine-year period, begin at Leo's funeral, with her aunt obsessed over whether Bob Hope will show up at the service. Ann returns four years later to comfort the aunt, named Cherrie, now dying of cancer and zonked out on Valium. Another trip to see the opening of her play (``LSD Just the High Points'') ``was the high point of a very high time for'' her. Meanwhile, Cherrie's family continues to entertain this obnoxious relative who mocks their apparent tackiness, their treatment of their servants, and their unenlightened politics. Some lesbian interludes and a strident call for ``more Amazonian [role] models'' suggest the gender-correct politics that underpin this awkward and amateurish book.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-85242-415-X
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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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