A thrilling tour de force.
Both a rich portrait of mid-century oil speculation and a classic tale of mother-daughter conflict, Utopia Texas is no paradise, but it’s a satisfying–and sometimes frightening–trip through purgatory.
At the heart of the novel is Brya Harrison, a rich Texan woman trying her hand at petroleum exploration. The search for crude in West Texas is a man’s game–at least mid-century, when the novel is set. But Brya, a tough dame with whom Byrd obviously sympathizes, throws herself into this new enterprise with hurricane force, buying up properties, as her husband says, “from here to Timbuktu.” Brya, whose past is a tortured patchwork of pain and loss, is recently remarried to Cole, Utopia’s most provocative character. Cole is a Jack Daniels-swilling, lecherous Texan who, despite his flaws, boasts a generous streak and a warm spot in his heart for his stepdaughter Olivia. Though Olivia is Brya’s daughter the two are polar opposites. An eccentric soul, the tall, gangly girl has few friends and can barely hear out of one ear. She also has a strange–one might call it Carrie-esque–tendency to court danger. For reasons that only eventually become starkly clear, mysterious accidents happen when Olivia is around–near-drownings, broken bones, deep cuts–and the hard-charging Brya is repeatedly challenged to cover up her daughter’s “mishaps” as she tries to maintain her social standing and make her way as a big oil speculator. As Byrd is well aware, thick, black oil is both the dark blood that gives her novel’s world life and the pitchy trap that snares the unwary in greed and vice. Oil, in other words, yields both promise and peril, and the author is adept at mining the different meanings of her novel’s central symbol. She is equally capable when it comes to balancing her two complex heroines. Though their destinies are intimately related, Brya and Olivia need to cut distinct paths through Utopia, and Byrd gives each such strength and definition that their inevitable clashes–and there are many–burn with the energy of an oil fire.
A thrilling tour de force.Pub Date: May 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4327-1752-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Unabashedly over the top at times but, still, a saga that gives rise to as much amusement as it does sober reflection. A...
In a witty, wacky, and endlessly erudite debut, DeWitt assembles everything from letters of the Greek alphabet to Fourier analysis to tell the tale of a boy prodigy, stuffed with knowledge beyond his years but frustrated by his mother’s refusal to identify his father.
Sibylla and five-year-old Ludovic are quite a pair, riding round and round on the Circle Line in London’s Underground while he reads the Odyssey in the original and she copes with the inevitable remarks by fellow passengers. Sibylla, an expatriate American making a living as a typist, herself possesses formidable intelligence, but her eccentricities are just as noteworthy. Believing Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai to be a film without peer, she watches it day after day, year after year, while in the one-night stand with Ludo’s father-to-be, she wound up in bed with him for no better reason than it wouldn’t have been polite not to, although subsequently she has nothing but scorn for his utterly conventional (if successful) travel books. Ludo she keeps in the dark about his patrimony, feeding him instead new languages at the rate of one or two a year, and, when an effort to put him in school with others his age wreaks havoc on the class, she resumes responsibility for his education, which, not surprisingly, relies heavily on Kurosawa’s film. As Ludo grows up, however, he will not be denied knowledge of his father, and sniffs him out—only to be as disappointed with him as his mother is. Hopes of happiness with the genuine article having been dashed, Ludo moves on to ideal candidates, and approaches a succession of geniuses, each time with a claim of being the man’s son. While these efforts are enlightening, they are also futile—and in one case tragic—until Ludo finds his match in one who knows the dialogue of Seven Samurai almost as well as he does.
Unabashedly over the top at times but, still, a saga that gives rise to as much amusement as it does sober reflection. A promising start, indeed.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7868-6668-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An attention-getting writer (novels, Memento Mori. The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Bachelors, and short stories, The Go-Away Bird) pursues her multi-personae interests, her concern with religion, and her refusal to allow the reader to be at one with her purpose. Here she disperses her story (a loose but provocative thing) over an extended — and interrupted — period (thirty years) during which Miss Brodie, (in her prime) holds young minds in thrall, at first in delight at the heady freedom she offers from the rigid, formal precepts of Edinburgh's Marcia Blaine (day) School, later in loyalty to her advanced sedition against the efforts to have her removed. Finally the girls grow up — and Monica, Rose, Eunice, Jenny, Mary, and Sandy, (particularly Sandy with her pig-like eyes) separate, and the "Brodie set" dissolves- with war, death, marriage, career, and conversion to Catholicism. But there still is a central focus — who among them betrayed Miss Brodie to the headmistress so that a long-desired dismissal was effective? In this less-than-a-novel, more-than-a-short story, there is the projection of a non-conformist teacher of the thirties, of a complex of personalties (which never becomes personal lives), and of issues which, floating, are never quite tangible. But Muriel Spark is sharp with her eyes and her ears and the craftiness of her craftsmanship is as precision-tooled as the finest of her driest etching. With the past record, the publisher's big push, and The New Yorker advance showing, this stands on its own.
Pub Date: Jan. 17, 1961
ISBN: 0061711292
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1961
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