Step aside, all you writers running on about the emptiness of small-town life. In this sprightly debut novel, Stevens portrays a suburban family with dignity, and it works as more than just a novelty. When her husband, Gordie, leaves her for another woman, Augusta Iris has a nervous breakdown in the supermarket parking lot, after which she takes to her bed and barely speaks to her younger son, Henry, who has just failed to graduate from high school and is mowing lawns for the summer for someone who deals marijuana on occasion. Frightened, Henry phones his older brother, Matthew, who comes home to Connecticut from Boston, where he is close to earning his Ph.D. in chemistry. Matthew is a loner who turns out to be inept at talking to his mother and mostly holes up in his boyhood room. Then Henry falls in love with Bette Mack, a spirited young woman who is bound to set his mother straight. After a disagreement with her own mother, she moves in with the Iris family and gets closer and closer to Augusta. This all sounds rather grim and clinical on paper, but Stevens has a light touch with domestic drama reminiscent of Laurie Colwin's. In sections that alternate between the third person and Augusta's voice, Bette encourages Augusta to smoke cigarettes and leaves newspapers in her room with horrible stories exposed (``car accidents, lost children, murders''), which Augusta eventually recognizes as ``the first company I'd had since Gordie left.'' Bette also works on drawing out Matthew (the two share an interest in vegetarianism) and goes a little too far with that project while Henry is obsessively working on a sculpture out in his father's old studio. Throughout, Stevens offers great insights in simple, direct language. This is not flawless work—Bette's own personality is never quite clear enough, and the ending is strikingly neat—but it is an impressive and delightful debut.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-85839-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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