Grim doings, grim humor, and grim wisdom abound in this masterful tale; a book well worth reading.
Good versus evil, the Depression, the Dust Bowl, a vagrant elephant, and a traveling circus— this novel has all that and more: Step right up, folks.
Wright (The Sky Is Far Away, 2019, etc.) has created a superb character in his protagonist, young Hughey Gibson. By the world’s reckoning, Hughey is a naif and a dreamer. Early on, he sees an elephant moseying along the tree line of the Gibson farm (or what’s left of it). A hundred pages later, his improbable vision is vindicated, but his reputation for being a moony innocent still stands. Hughey’s opposite is Jakes McConnell, the epitome of bad company. He talks Hughey into going to the circus, and soon Hughey is accused of being Jakes’ accomplice in a burglary. So now there is no going back to Shelbyville, Missouri. Like it or not, Hughey is now a roustabout. And he does come to like it, especially when he catches the eye of Marlina Sova, the circus girl who rides the elephant. But bad luck and bad company keep dogging him until he is linked to a homicide (Jakes again). Through it all, people either believe in Hughey’s innate innocence or are dumbfounded by him. Wright is a wonderful writer (The elephant “slapped lazily across a crazed and wirehaired shoulder with its pendulous and serpentine trunk”). The big question is: What are readers to make of Hughey? Is he hopelessly naïve or naively hopeful? A subtitle might be The Education of Hughey Gibson, but what he learns seems to be a kind of fatalism and acceptance. Which is hardly surprising. This is a hard world of creepy criminals and corrupt cops, a lesson that over time he reluctantly accepts. As an apt coda, the final chapters feature the mother of all dust storms. Hughey finally “sees the elephant,” as the old idiom goes. Still, as the author skillfully shows, this world needs its Hughey Gibsons. And that turns out to be a terrible indictment of this world.
Grim doings, grim humor, and grim wisdom abound in this masterful tale; a book well worth reading.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-388-19341-6
Page Count: 285
Publisher: Artichoke Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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