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RAMEAU'S NIECE

Name: RAMEAU'S NIECE
Author: Cathleen Schine
ISBN: 0-395-65490-4

by Cathleen Schine ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 1993

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A pretentious tale of deluded love and lust in Manhattan's indulged academe—in a third from Schine (Alice in Bed, 1983; To the Birdhouse, 1990). Margaret Nathan—a historian who can't remember anything and the author of the surprising bestseller The Anatomy of Madame de Montigny—is hailed as brilliant by deconstructionists, feminists, and ordinary readers, none of whom has actually read her book. All of which sounds like a promising start for a comic novel of manners that will wittily skewer current literary icons and political shibboleths—except that Margaret, happily married to Edward, a Columbia English professor who constantly quotes poetry, is instead trapped in a story defined by an idea: a heavy, literary 18th- century idea based on her discovery of an obscure Enlightenment manuscript called Rameau's Niece, a not-so-subtle play on the actual Rameau's Nephew by Diderot—a philosophical work in the form of a dialogue between a lecherous philosopher and his beautiful female pupil. As Margaret translates the work—a pastiche of filched quotes—she's not only seduced by what she's reading but increasingly bored with Edward, finally deciding that ``the desire to know really is desire'' and that what she needs is a new lover. It's a decision that leads to embarrassing encounters with her teeth-obsessed dentist; with a kindly Belgian salesman who merely wants to give her the latest in hi-fi equipment; and with a friend of a former college roommate, who may be having an affair with husband Edward. This should make for high stylish comedy, of course, but it doesn't, as Margaret, the relentless theoretician, now back with Edward, recalls the philosopher's other advice: ``...in the end our truest opinions are not the ones we have changed, but those to which we have most often returned.'' Smug and smirky in-jokes without much bite and less humor, regaled by and for characters who well deserve their narrow, complacent lives.

Pub Date: April 2, 1993

ISBN: 0-395-65490-4

Page Count: 280

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
KÜNSTLERS IN PARADISE
by Cathleen Schine

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GRAMMARIANS
by Cathleen Schine

- BOOK REVIEW
THEY MAY NOT MEAN TO, BUT THEY DO
by Cathleen Schine

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

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DISTANT SHORES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...

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Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.

After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).