Readers willing to be dragged through hell will take Liam to heart.
O’Sullivan’s “fictionalized memoir” chronicles a horror-filled life.
Meet Liam McCarthy, memoirist O’Sullivan’s alter ego, in this, his first writing effort. Young Liam, Irish born and raised, slips into this country on a tourist visa. For the next 400 pages (and about 20 years), we follow Liam through daily hell, much of it of his own making. Not only has he a taste for booze, but he quickly develops a taste for cocaine and Xanax. With little education and having to live below governmental radar, he gets only pickup jobs—plastering, roofing and the like—and many last only a week, if that, though in the Irish underground economy, the lads do (mostly) look out for one another. Housing is another horror: cheap digs with five or six crammed together. What should go toward groceries goes toward beer or drugs. Liam is desperate for a woman but so ashamed of his appearance that he makes do with a notorious inflatable girlfriend. His self-esteem is close to nil and steadily dropping. But slowly, there are hopeful developments. He finds rehab and AA, gets married and is sober for 8 years, a remarkable achievement. Readers root for him. Then the marriage sours, and Liam relapses. But he hasn’t hit rock bottom yet. (Rock bottom is described in the opening chapter; then we flash back to the beginning, in 1985). Liam does find solid redemption or else there would be no story. Of course, he doesn’t become whole and happy overnight, but he has found what blighted his life and the means to begin again. The subject is relentlessly bleak but not so the execution of it. There is even saving humor (but only just). Liam is likable, and the idiomatic Irish voice is strong and direct, with a lilt to it. And the ending is wonderfully handled.
Readers willing to be dragged through hell will take Liam to heart.Pub Date: June 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615732176
Page Count: 434
Publisher: Sylvie O'
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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