An earnest but stiff and uninvolving exploration of love and its discontents.
A suspicious double suicide sparks sexual turmoil and soul-searching among investigators in this knotty, stilted debut novel of ideas.
Famed anti-Communist intellectual Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel Darkness at Noon is a seminal critique of Stalinism. In Otterman’s (Inmate 1818 and Other Stories, 2014, etc.) novel, Koestler’s and his wife’s real-life 1983 suicide by barbiturates poses thorny questions for fictional London coroner Jack Candrel and his inquiry. One is whether Cynthia Koestler, 55 years old and in good health, volunteered to follow her elderly, terminally ill husband to the grave or was coerced. Another is the mystery of love, as embodied in the bond between Koestler, a compulsive philanderer, abusive cad and accused rapist, and the women who were unaccountably devoted to him. This second question is most resonant for Jack, who’s been taking testosterone injections to revive his flagging potency and marriage. He finds himself so randy that he starts an affair with Koestler’s illegitimate daughter Kristie, a beautiful ballerina. Meanwhile, Jack’s fetching assistant Rita, a sexually aggressive woman, starts her own affair with Frankel Dorfman, a Jewish-American literary scholar specializing in Koestler’s writings who’s consulting on the case. (Because what police inquiry is complete without a literary scholar?) This historical why-dunit touches cursorily on episodes from Koestler’s life, but his and Cynthia’s deaths take a back seat to other characters’ tangled relationships and associated conundrums: Are love and lust compatible? Are women entitled to the same sexual freedom as men? When does commitment become pathological? Jack, Kristie, Frankel and Rita ruminate on these issues in between graphic yet perfunctory sex scenes and pleasant but humdrum dates. Unfortunately, the resulting dialogue feels wooden and didactic (“throughout history, marriage has not been seen as a vehicle for expressing love and devotion, but rather a way of cementing alliances between families, enhancing family wealth or status, and ensuring that tradition continues on into succeeding generations)” or painfully Freudian (“Kristie may signify the new mother and you, her young boy,” intones Jack’s therapist). When the characters finally confront betrayals, the novel carries some real emotional weight. Too often, though, it bogs down in aimless philosophizing.
An earnest but stiff and uninvolving exploration of love and its discontents.Pub Date: April 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9906747-1-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: Liber Novus Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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