A chatty and ultimately brittle second novel (after Coe's I Love Devine, 1987) about a gay man and his two lovers in the age of AIDS. Coe tells his story through a series of flashbacks, taking readers on a tour of the unbridled gay sex scene of the 70's and early 80's. Timothy, the discursive and self-conscious narrator, a self-described ``pansy bitch of the world,'' knocks his way around Manhattan's bathhouses and sex clubs and learns some brutal lessons (e.g., he always goes to other men's houses for sex because ``no man is apt to kill you in his house, where he would be obliged to get rid of the body''). Eventually, Timothy befriends two older, more sophisticated men—Jasper, who becomes his longtime lover, and Dominick. The bulk of the story is Timothy's frivolous and onrushing account of the ``splendid'' meals, sex, and travel he and his lovers once enjoyed. (None of these characters appears to be employed in any fashion, but they live fabulously nonetheless.) Meanwhile, Timothy's faux sophistication is often cloying: ``I upgraded to first class and ranted when a negroni could not be provided. I bitched about the champagne, hissed at the stewardess that I despised Dom Perignon.'' The book takes a more serious tone when, later, the specter of AIDS looms. Jasper dies, and Dominick falls ill. When Timothy discovers he's HIV-positive, he wanders the streets, scanning faces for ``signs of illness.'' He half expects to see ``thousands of men looking like Rock Hudson, with those same frightened eyes.'' It all ends on something of an upbeat note—when Timothy decides to take his infection as a challenge to live more fully. By this point, though, most readers will be exasperated by Coe's tone-deaf prose. Timothy has an awful disease, but in the end he's too much of a twit to care about deeply.
Pub Date: Aug. 31, 1993
ISBN: 0-15-186426-8
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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