A novel to be savored more than once, written with the same languorous, rumbling passion of Paul Newman and Joanne...
Looking behind propriety’s lace-curtain gentility into the hardwoods of sin, Brookhouse (Loving Ryan, 2010, etc.) offers pure Southern noir.
It’s 1960, and Francis Finnegan Butler is approaching 30 when Belle, widow of Judge Timon Spier, dies. Called Judge since he "was too big for his britches because he had money and power and didn’t have to sully himself with practicing law," Judge raised Finn after the 14-year-old boy was abandoned by his mother, even sending him to a prestigious local school, the Academy. Now Finn teaches there, and he's voted to admit the school's first black student. That upsets Delia, the oldest Spier sister, but it doesn’t matter to Annabel, next youngest, nor Caroline. Brookhouse writes memorable characters: cleareyed Finn, of course, and Annabel, who seduced him at 15 and still lures him to bed; Henry Broken-ground, an Indian full of secrets; Erskine, jaded yet progressive newspaper editor; Danielle, his reporter, who loves Finn enough to wait out his fascination with Annabel; Buck, a hick Bull Connor, who inherited his daddy’s sheriff’s office; and Lester and Tracy, lawyers who unlock the mysteries of Schilling Club and a fur coat flaunted by a cross-dressing pastor. The plot follows the impending school integration, with Finn’s house burned and threats rumbling, but like mist in the pines, the mysteries binding Finn and the Spiers together hover over the tale. Delia bars Finn from Red Sticks, the family mansion, but Finn can't rest until he understands why his mother abandoned him and why the Judge gave him a home. A layered work, mottled and shifting like visions through antique glass, shadowed by ever lurking violence, as if written by a Southern-born Jim Harrison.
A novel to be savored more than once, written with the same languorous, rumbling passion of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s film The Long Hot Summer.Pub Date: March 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9798226-5-0
Page Count: 122
Publisher: Safe Harbor
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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