A lucid, gratifying novel with appeal for both LGBT readers and anyone interested in a particularly pivotal slice of San...
History and melodrama combine in this brisk novel centered on the murder of gay rights political advocate Harvey Milk.
Charles, a poet and English professor at the University of Montana, dramatically addresses an important era in San Francisco history with this tale of equality and sexual liberation. At the helm of his novel is Christopher Mann, a closeted gay man who moves to San Francisco in 1978 to begin law school after months of career and personal indecisiveness. Though he chalks up his clandestine gay tendencies to “experimentation, like dropping acid or parachuting,” Mann’s burgeoning homosexuality continues to simmer throughout law school against a revolutionary backdrop of changing societal mores. Impressively drawn supporting characters march in, adding flair and personality to Charles’ companionable narrative. Among them are Mann’s new best buddy, Jim Reilly; Gordo, a Hispanic homeless man with a secret history; Mexican-American student and Jim’s fiancee, Laura Esquival; and Wendy, another first-year student, who ends up interning for a legislator and becomes knee-deep in the historic anti–gay-teacher initiative, Proposition 6. Personal opinion heats up Mann’s torturous law classes and his personal life, a confused space he still hasn’t worked out while sleeping with Wendy. Ultimately, what drive the novel are the author’s impressive exploration of Mann’s internal struggle with his orientation, his parents’ generational divide, and the region’s embroilment in the prickly sexual politics of the late 1970s. Atmospheric and historically accurate, Charles’ memorable set pieces include Mann’s fidgety first time in a gay bar and a forbidden beachfront tryst with Jim, which ultimately sabotages his engagement. Perhaps most compelling is the pivotal era in which the novel is set, a time when Harvey Milk became the first openly gay Bay Area elected official while homophobic opponents such as Anita Bryant, Jim Briggs, and city supervisor Dan White staunchly advocated public intolerance. Charles expertly weaves his characters into the era’s drama while compassionately addressing issues such as coming out, bigotry, and the struggle for equality.
A lucid, gratifying novel with appeal for both LGBT readers and anyone interested in a particularly pivotal slice of San Francisco history.Pub Date: April 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-1619290860
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Regal Crest Enterprises, LLC
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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