A first collection of 18 stories from novelist GÇbler (The Cure, 1994, not reviewed; etc.), writing from Northern Ireland, ranges near and far to provide gritty closeups of life’s less-distinguished moments, when desperation most overwhelms. The title piece presents an elderly ÇmigrÇ couple in London who are all but consumed by guilt at their only son’s suicide a few years earlier. Their inability to release their sadness by acknowledging a share of the blame is finally ended when the son’s widow stops by to tell them she’s remarrying. This is about as cheery as these stricken tales get. The opener, “The Chekhov Student,” is more typically lugubrious. It presents another elderly couple, unhappily married for decades, whose moment of enlightenment comes when the meek husband (—My name is Douglas Peter. . . I am extremely miserable. . . . I need to describe the troubles of my life—), having stood up at last to his spouse in one of their rows, concludes on reflection that he’s about to die. “Puerto Vallarta,”set in that Mexican resort, centers on a deranged, child-chomping Rottweiler, whose spectacular electrocution in a violent storm (as it gnaws on a pilfered chicken) is greeted with cheers by the neighbors. “Four Pesos,” which takes place in a Cuban coastal town, concerns a petty but disastrous betrayal by a Canadian tourist, on holiday to forget her just-failed marriage, who agrees to buy forbidden goods from the tourists-only store for the maid who cleans her room, then turns her in when the woman comes up a few pesos short in their exchange. The message here, “It’s a grim world, after all,” albeit precisely rendered, at the same time suffers from too narrow a focus on the bruised or broken marriage theme: tellingly, the one suggestion of a joyous union, between a journalist and the daughter of the landed gentry he’s interviewing (“A Short Story”), comes across as utterly fatuous.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-7145-3035-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy,...
Britisher Haddon debuts in the adult novel with the bittersweet tale of a 15-year-old autistic who’s also a math genius.
Christopher Boone has had some bad knocks: his mother has died (well, she went to the hospital and never came back), and soon after he found a neighbor’s dog on the front lawn, slain by a garden fork stuck through it. A teacher said that he should write something that he “would like to read himself”—and so he embarks on this book, a murder mystery that will reveal who killed Mrs. Shears’s dog. First off, though, is a night in jail for hitting the policeman who questions him about the dog (the cop made the mistake of grabbing the boy by the arm when he can’t stand to be touched—any more than he can stand the colors yellow or brown, or not knowing what’s going to happen next). Christopher’s father bails him out but forbids his doing any more “detecting” about the dog-murder. When Christopher disobeys (and writes about it in his book), a fight ensues and his father confiscates the book. In time, detective-Christopher finds it, along with certain other clues that reveal a very great deal indeed about his mother’s “death,” his father’s own part in it—and the murder of the dog. Calming himself by doing roots, cubes, prime numbers, and math problems in his head, Christopher runs away, braves a train-ride to London, and finds—his mother. How can this be? Read and see. Neither parent, if truth be told, is the least bit prepossessing or more than a cutout. Christopher, though, with pet rat Toby in his pocket and advanced “maths” in his head, is another matter indeed, and readers will cheer when, way precociously, he takes his A-level maths and does brilliantly.
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy, moving, and likely to be a smash.Pub Date: June 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50945-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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