Fleming’s ability to fully inhabit the consciousness of her characters is flawless, as are her portraits of the ordinary and...
Self-assured exploration of day-to-day family trauma, and then some.
In most ways, the Riggs family is completely ordinary, even boring. The family is composed of two devoted parents, the requisite smart-aleck son and two daughters who squabble their way from childhood to adolescence. The one anomaly is that the oldest daughter is an albino, a condition that affects everyone in the family. The novel is focused mainly on daughters Glynnis and Carol, and it traces the standard fare: childhood traumas; the Byzantine social codes of adolescent girls; unpredictable sexual desires; the comforting and smothering nature of family life. Fleming’s adherence to the rules of the coming-of-age family drama makes her clever riffs on the genre all the more potent. For example, in one of the most important childhood events, Carol, frustrated at the social exclusion she experiences because she is an albino, pushes a piano on her younger sister Glynnis, permanently disabling her. Fleming’s unabashed reliance on such extravagantly over-the-top events threatens to undermine the story, turning it into mere parody, but her gift at characterization anchors the novel and proves utterly compelling while being heavily plotted—the girls are constantly negotiating the landmines of adolescence—but character-driven all the same. Particularly noteworthy are the minor characters: Beryl Balls, the former war nurse who devotes herself to making girls self-reliant in the Girl Guides, and who cherishes an unconsummated and unrecognized romance with another nurse killed in the war; Tracy Novak, the cool lesbian with whom Glynnis falls in love at school; Grunt, Carol’s misfit, stuttering, wannabe punk boyfriend. Fleming treads a fine line between describing scenes of social trauma so pitch perfect readers will squirm in their chairs and moments of transcendence during which characters see the possibility of happiness and human connection.
Fleming’s ability to fully inhabit the consciousness of her characters is flawless, as are her portraits of the ordinary and extraordinary life of adolescent girls.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-55192-831-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Raincoast
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
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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