An original take on a boy’s coming-of-age and a sly, thoughtful look at the complexities of faith.
Debut featuring a wisenheimer young hero with a little sister who may or may not be a living saint.
One may be forgiven for thinking off the bat that first-person narrator Monroe Anderson—young, cynical, frustrated and perhaps a little too clever for his own good—is just another Holden Caulfield wannabe. But the novel takes an unexpected turn when Monroe—on his way to the pool house to get high before prom—finds his little sister Annicka floating face-down and motionless in the deep end. Monroe dives in after her, and, in doing so, not only rescues the ten-year-old, but also launches a series of events that give him substantial fodder for adolescent philosophizing, and which give his story a unique and intriguing shape. Annicka emerges from the pool alive but unconscious. A pretty little girl in a coma, she elicits considerable attention in her community and in the media—attention that only increases when Annicka seems to be the source of miracles, beginning with a shower of rose petals and culminating in stigmata and reports of faith-healing. Thus, Monroe must contend not just with the usual crises and calamities of young adulthood—most of them having to do with sex or the absence of same—but he also has to deal with the loss of his sister and the growing congregation of Annicka’s devotees, a group that includes his newly devout mother. Monroe is a precocious and kind-hearted theologian, and he asks some trenchant questions of a religion that not only accepts suffering, but promotes it, and although Krause is sometimes too willing to end his chapters with pithy aphorisms, he is ultimately wise enough to leave many of the thorny metaphysical and ethical questions his novel examines unanswered.
An original take on a boy’s coming-of-age and a sly, thoughtful look at the complexities of faith.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6464-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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