Recycled farce from the author of Second Wives (1999), filled with dopey puns and dated pop-culture references. Earth to...
Sex, cigarettes, and self-pity.
Newly divorced freelance-journalist Samantha leaves New York and heads for London. Why, oh why, did David, trendy photographer, dump her for a beautiful model? Perhaps Georgia Green will know. Georgia is American but married (unhappily) to David’s best friend, the oh-so-British Andrew. She’s clever, successful, and even has a requisite fetish for chick-lit plots: she’s still obsessing over split ends at age 35. When not twiddling her hair, she’s a literary agent, with one very successful client, Eugenie Woodrow, the author of Let Her Go, a thriller about three beauties who fall in love with their deranged but sexy kidnapper. At the moment, Eugenie has a bad case of writer’s block—but she comes up with an utterly marvelous idea. Perhaps Samantha’s miserable experiences could be appropriated for her next novel! Given enough alcohol and other encouragement, Samantha could even be an avenging angel, taking revenge on all bastards—beginning with John Rankin, the handsome gynecologist who jilted sweet young Jilly and others. Too naïve to say no, Samantha lets the two older women take over. Eugenie advises her on clothes and makeup, while Georgia delves into more intimate areas, like the removal of unfashionable body hair. A day or two later, painted, primped, and waxed to the shrieking point, Sam ventures into Rankin’s lair. He’s smitten with the young American, who continues to play the game even though faintly disgusted by the doctor’s overconfident lechery. Then she finds a list of all his lovers and their ratings, in stars. The trio looks for names they know, mostly in order to stir up more pointless trouble—and so it goes.
Recycled farce from the author of Second Wives (1999), filled with dopey puns and dated pop-culture references. Earth to author: Phil Donahue is off the air and Princess Diana is dead.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7278-5905-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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