Sometimes indecipherable, often intriguing, this literary and existential mystery-within-a-novel may remind readers of the fiction of Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, and other authors who chart the modern American search for identity. Wright's (Tony and Susan, 1993, etc.) book opens with a man writing about his life. The man reveals that he was formerly known as Peter Gregory, a 35-year-old high school English teacher with an ex-wife and kids, who tried unsuccessfully to drown himself in the Ohio River. Fleeing a past that may have involved the murder of his neighbor with a hammer, he hitches rides east, assuming and discarding aliases along the way: Murray Bree, the hitchhiker, is traded for Stephen White, the typewriter-shop employee, and so on. When an eccentric billionaire summons him to his New York office and gives him a grant he can't refuse—$30 million to become yet another new person and cut all ties to the past—he becomes the miraculously fortunate Stephen Trace. Unfortunately for Trace, the detritus of Peter Gregory's life keeps resurfacing. When his benefactor dies in a plane crash and the company's successors come after Trace for his assets, he is forced to flee once again, this time back into the past for a dramatic reconciliation. Wright skillfully conveys how we choose to elude our pasts rather than face them, molding ourselves into different people for separate occasions. While at first we grumble over seemingly meaningless names, the literary games the author plays, and the rules he breaks, the story gains clarity and absorbs us after we start worrying about what the hero is going to do with his cash. Not a mystery in the conventional sense but certainly mysterious, Wright's novel challengingly suggests that we are all con artists in flight from ourselves. An intellectual wordsmith's whodunit.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-880909-12-X
Page Count: 305
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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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