A family portrait of considerable eloquence and intelligence, rendered somewhat uneven by Ruth’s portion being the most...
A tragic past and a difficult present converge quietly and compassionately in Raeff’s debut, a tale of three generations of women in a family still coming to terms with the Holocaust.
In 1996, the oldest generation, in the figure of 86-year-old Ruth, is still unbowed. After the death of her physician husband Karl the year before, Ruth, a former nurse, has begun volunteering daily at an AIDS hospice in Greenwich Village as a way to keep herself active. The youngest generation, represented by teenaged granddaughter Deborah, is still facing the questions of youth: how to deal with friends, family, and the future. But she is a talented cellist, and playing her music gives her a refuge from the current family crisis. For it is the middle generation, Deborah’s mother and Ruth’s daughter, the depressed and bedridden Clara, who seems most oppressed by the family’s past. Ruth finds an outlet for her frustration with Clara by telling her life story to Tommy, an embittered hospice patient dying without having told his family. She speaks of her own childhood in Vienna, of her father’s terminal melancholia, of her father’s doctor becoming her husband (even though he was gay), of their flight from the Nazis and eventual capture late in the war, and of life in the concentration camp, which culminated in the birth of Clara days before they were liberated. Tommy doesn’t live to hear the whole story. Deborah, meanwhile, somewhat uncertain about her own sexuality, runs away from the stench of Clara’s sickness, which pervades their house in New Jersey, and finds herself knocking on Ruth’s door in the city. When no one answers, she goes in through the window to wait, and when Ruth comes home from her last vigil with Tommy, they go together to see what can be done about poor Clara.
A family portrait of considerable eloquence and intelligence, rendered somewhat uneven by Ruth’s portion being the most compelling by far.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2002
ISBN: 1-931561-16-8
Page Count: 258
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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