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 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
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
