Underplotted, but with the fast pace, you scarcely notice: another small gem from Edgerton (Where Trouble Sleeps, 1997,...
For sheer likability it’d be hard to beat Edgerton’s affectionate portraits of small-town oddballs in the South. His eighth outing is a breezy comedy, tinged with sadness.
Carl Turnage is a mild-mannered, thoroughly decent guy, but not a commanding presence in his North Carolina town; if only he were a little taller, his voice a little deeper. A middle-aged bachelor, he was raised by his mother and her two sisters; the sole survivor is his aunt Lil, now at Rosehaven nursing home and shrinking fast, though still an occasional driver, and that’s a problem. Carl (he and Aunt Lil are real close) is bracing himself to tell her she must stop, just as we brace for more old-folks-behind-the-wheel jokes; but they still have some real zip in this go-round, shot through by the old folks’ somber awareness that their final spin may be the beginning of the end. The other principal here is L. Ray Flowers, a flamboyant if loopy former evangelist whose sermons might begin with your feet (“Don’t be afraid to buy expensive shoes”). He went through a bad patch when a woman he was “healing” fell off the stage and killed herself, and now he has a cockamamie scheme to combine churches and nursing-homes, but so what? He gets Carl back to writing country songs (their gig together is Carl’s dream come true), and he sure perks up all the old ladies; the exception is Darla Avery, who remembers their nightmare date 40 years ago, when L. Ray masturbated in the car after the eighth-grade dance. This is all the ammunition Rosehaven’s hard-nosed owner needs to have L. Ray, an obvious troublemaker, evicted. Meanwhile, Aunt Lil has started “sundowning” (“They get confused after the sun goes down,” explains the nurse). There can be no happy ending here, but even a stroke and a death are handled with a light touch.
Underplotted, but with the fast pace, you scarcely notice: another small gem from Edgerton (Where Trouble Sleeps, 1997, etc.).Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2003
ISBN: 1-56512-195-3
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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