A harsh but often engaging novel rendered in incantatory country language.
Lindemuth (Solomon Bull, 2017, etc.) tells the story of a moonshiner who goes up against the local mob in this rural noir novel.
In the woods surrounding the small town of Gleason, North Carolina, middle-aged Baer Creighton brews moonshine, nurses old heartaches, and keeps away from the local crime boss, Joe Stipe. Baer can’t lie, and he can’t abide hearing the falsehoods of others—they cause him to experience an electrical sensation that he can barely control—and so he prefers the company of his beloved pit bull, Fred, to that of people. When Stipe and his dogfighting cronies kidnap Fred and force the animal to fight for its life, the oft-drunk Baer swears revenge. At first, he believes that he’s up to the task, and he concocts a plan that will allow him to retaliate from a safe distance. Stipe, however, proves to be a brutal opponent; to survive this feud, Baer will be forced to the edge of his psyche as he confronts the lies in his past. Lindemuth writes in a Southern dialect that perfectly evokes the woods and hollows of the Carolina hills. Baer’s voice is as textured as the landscape (“All my life I got out the way so the liars and cheats could go on lying and cheating one another. I can spot a liar like nobody”), and the brutal acts that he describes are timeless and primal. Even within the bounds of this vernacular, Lindemuth manages to fashion sharp observations: “Cory Smylie was irredeemable, but given the vastness of Stipe’s enterprise, odd jobs presented that were uniquely suited to irredeemable men.” The book is on the long side and would perhaps have benefited from the removal of a few scenes. But the world of Gleason is so immersive and Baer’s vendetta so oddly compelling that readers will forgive some occasional bloat. Fans of noir tales set in rural America will particularly welcome this addition to the genre.
A harsh but often engaging novel rendered in incantatory country language.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-615-93824-0
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Hardgrave Enterprises
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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