A first novel striving for witty sophistication in the vein of Woody Allen, but falling far short of its mark.
Meandering jumble of clichés about a woman who prefers men of her father’s age.
Thirty-two-year-old Chicago ad-drone and former journalist Anna Schopenhauer, the whiny, self-centered daughter of Lithuanian Holocaust survivors, has just published her first short story in, of all places, The Atlantic Monthly. Called “Funny Accent,” the story—which either comprises the first chapter of the present novel or simply includes the same information—recounts Anna’s ten-year unconsummated affair with a family friend, Misha, also a survivor. Such a confession would—in the world of the novel—be scandalous enough, were it not for the fact that married Misha began romancing Anna when she was 13. Now, Anna must simultaneously come to grips with her past and figure out whether she has a future with either of the two older men in her life, both more stereotype than character: Gregory, the drunken goy playwright with whom Anna’s been involved for five years, and Sydney, a famous Jewish fiction-writer—Saul Bellow, seemingly—with a penchant for younger women (indeed, author of a novel entitled Younger Women). After much labored, pseudo-profound monologuing about love and sex (“ ‘I sometimes think my feelings for you are real the way they aren’t with anyone else’ ” ), Anna leaves Chicago for a visit with her parents (more monologuing), where she has the opportunity to take revenge on Misha for the harm he inflicted on her. It’s not quite clear why she seeks revenge, since she claims to have reciprocated Misha’s affections and to have been angry when he broke off their relationship. But then again, nothing is quite clear in this ragbag of a novel, which, albeit a small irritation, veers back and forth from first- to third-person seemingly without reason.
A first novel striving for witty sophistication in the vein of Woody Allen, but falling far short of its mark.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-27517-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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