An inventive story about the ebb and flow of the artistic process, and of life itself.
Co-authors Bishop and Fuller (Realists, 2013, etc.) draw on decades of experience as playwrights and puppeteers to craft a novel about love and creativity.
Puppeteer Albert Fisher is coming up on the first anniversary of the death of his wife and collaborator, Lainie. He’s set financially and could retire, but a story begins to bloom in his mind that he can’t resist turning into a puppet production. It’s a tale of Sir Galahad’s quest for the Holy Grail, told in this novel as a story within a story. Fisher struggles to create a satisfying narrative and reflects on what his creative choices tell him about himself. He names Galahad’s wife after his daughter, Mara; he adds a young boy, separated from his parents and lost in time, and a court fool named Sammy. He can’t figure out why he has Mara disguise herself as the fool to join Galahad on his quest, and he’s challenged on the point by Jeanette Ward, a costumer he hired to dress the puppets that he’s building. As the fictional and real-life journeys continue, Fisher and Jeanette get emotionally closer. But every step forward brings more questions for Fisher as the quest in his story mirrors events in his life. The authors resist supplying easy answers for their characters, just as Fisher resists doing so for his. They intriguingly mention that Fisher is visible to the audience as he controls his puppets—an unmistakable reference to their own experience writing the novel. The novel ends up as a kind of fun house mirror of puppets controlling puppets, with little sense of who or what is controlling it all. In this respect, it feels a bit like Tom Stoppard’s famous 1966 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It’s both an existential drama and a comedy, in which the reader’s aha moment is the realization that an epiphany isn’t forthcoming. This may bother readers who like everything wrapped up in a neat bow, but others will find it satisfyingly realistic.
An inventive story about the ebb and flow of the artistic process, and of life itself.Pub Date: June 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9997287-0-3
Page Count: 196
Publisher: WordWorkers Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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