A marvelously down-and-dirty chronicle of a presidential campaign that will make your eyes water, and some more famous eyes burn, in recognition. His rivals for the Democratic nomination—a decorated Vietnam vet, a dinosaur populist, a ``neo-Martian'' egghead, the on-again/off-again governor of New York—may have stronger credentials of one kind or another, but none of them has put together the package Gov. Jack Stanton has: a mastery of the issues, an uncanny ability to connect with the people he meets, and a grimly talented wife who shares his Energizer-bunny determination to keep on going. So Henry Burton, the rather unconvincingly half-black narrator, signs on as Stanton's deputy campaign manager and heads with him to New Hampshire. Like politics itself, the ensuing account makes no pretense of beguiling the reader, instead dumping out fictionalized names and situations like toxic waste. Stanton's ship of fools will be threatened in rapid succession by his youthful indiscretions at the 1968 Chicago convention; his tabloidal dalliance with his wife's hairdresser; discreet rumors of paternity from still another quarter; and a disgruntled driver alleging racial slurs he overheard (you won't believe what Stanton has to promise to shut him up). The picture of electoral politics that emerges has nothing to do with substantive issues—woe to the candidate who goes on record with any specific policy position—and everything to do with imagery, tactical advantages, not blinking first, and triage. This familiar picture is given new urgency by the momentum Stanton's campaign develops, even when it's being driven by the reflexive reactions of his clueless campaign manager or his psychopathically devoted chief of staff—or, more often, by no one, no one at all. Only the nobility that several key characters improbably evince in the closing pages breaks the illusion of authenticity. Mystery insider's view or not, this is a delicious gift for your friends who still believe that politics and politicians have the answers.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44859-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
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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