Assured, often lyrical and true to the world of the star-maker machinery behind the popular song. A lively complement to...
Satisfying, near-epic tale of a British rock band, from the fresh young faces of the ’60s to the melting-cheese faces of today.
For his latest fictional foray into the entertainment biz (New Bedlam, 2007, etc.), MTV vice president Flanagan takes as his narrator/protagonist Jack Flynn, a born rock ’n’ roll manager who is therefore destined always to be a disappointment to his pious Irish parents. Especially when the budding young solicitor is disbarred after a drug arrest, a bum rap that puts the members of The Ravons forevermore in his debt. (He pocketed their dope.) These young British rockers are, of course, spoiled children with enormous appetites for sex and drugs; they’re also on a mission to conquer the world. Relating his tale in a bittersweet voice from the vantage of the present, meaning that he is now in his late 60s, Jack charts The Ravons’ rise and eventual fall; their demise, naturally, is a sordid matter of money, jealousy and publishing rights. Flanagan is note-perfect, particularly on the small details of life back in the day: “We forget now that airplanes, restaurants, movie theaters, taxis, offices and homes were all full of smoke then. There were ashtrays in every armrest.” The Ravons are one- or two-hit wonders, and they break up a third of the way into the narrative, but there’s much more to the story—many more opportunities, that is, for egos to swell, tempers to flare and adenoids to trill. In the end, Jack pulls off the near-impossible, reuniting The Ravons for a world tour that has all the earmarks of a Spinal Tap outing. Suffice it to say that in the end he learns once again that no good deed goes unpunished.
Assured, often lyrical and true to the world of the star-maker machinery behind the popular song. A lively complement to Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, Mark Hudson’s The Music in My Head and Laurence Gonzales’s Jambeaux.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-4845-7
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
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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