Not a false note anywhere in a story that’s as entertaining as it is wise. Anshaw just keeps getting better.
A tender comedy of contemporary manners from Anshaw (Aquamarine, 1992, etc.), centered on a mother and daughter who love each other but can’t quite connect.
Fern has never really forgiven Nora for coming out as a lesbian and taking Fern away from her father to live in a series of ramshackle apartments with a transient population of overnight girlfriends. Though Fern’s now in college and Nora has settled down with calm, domestic (albeit slightly controlling) Jeanne, she still fears that her mother will pull another disappearing act. Spending time with her wild friend Tracy, who refuses to discuss the paternity of infant son Vaughn, Fern can see how hard it is to be a young woman thrust unexpectedly into motherhood (as Nora was). Fern tends to Vaughn with more patience and purpose than Tracy can muster, but she still relates to Nora like a sullen teenager. Anshaw delineates their touchy exchanges in pitch-perfect, ruefully funny dialogue, and she surrounds them with a wonderfully vivid cast of supporting characters: Nora’s cross-dressing (but straight) brother Harold, with whom Fern is close; the judgmental administrative assistant at the adult-education program Nora heads; Fern’s new slacker boyfriend James (who could be Vaughn’s father); Pam, the very butch contractor Nora is sneaking around with; and Lucky, Fern’s aging dog. The author skillfully moves in and out of various people’s heads, back and forth in time, weaving a seamless narrative that gradually unfolds the characters’ motivations, past history, and gropings toward a more satisfying future. There won’t be a dry eye in the house when Lucky’s death moves Fern and Nora toward a more adult emotional relationship, even though the scene is as understated and subtle as every other element in Anshaw’s compassionate portrait of human frailty and resilience. The finale offers hope for almost everyone, but no easy promises of smooth sailing ahead.
Not a false note anywhere in a story that’s as entertaining as it is wise. Anshaw just keeps getting better.Pub Date: May 22, 2002
ISBN: 0-395-94040-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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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