An ambitious but intrusively “literary” novel of people and animals, the animals this time far more interesting than the...
Mazza (Dog People, 1997, etc.) weaves together faxes, italicized internal musings, flashback dialogue, standard narrative, and letters typed on an old-fashioned manual machine to explore the convergence of a wildlife biologist’s personal identity crisis with another crisis in the natural world.
Brian travels to Wyoming to conduct a follow-up investigation on cougars that have been experimentally relocated from California. In a small town near Rawlins, he hires a young assistant, Leya, and takes up a moonlighting job killing the coyote that are considered vermin by local ranchers. Monitoring his cougars, shooting coyote from a helicopter, becoming involved in questionable dealings with a local rancher, and possibly falling in love with Leya, Brian tests himself continually, both as a marksman and as a potential killer or protector of human prey. Unfortunately, for all the trappings of experimental fiction, Mazza has constructed Brian essentially as the stock romantic male: brooding, withdrawn, sensitive. His fear about his murderous intent, we discover, is tied to guilt over the part he played (or did not play) in his older sister’s suicide when he was 13. The story of that horrendous family crisis, though, with its violence and incest anchored in cliché, fails to build weight or suspense. Similarly, while Brian’s romance with Leya is charged on Brian’s part with an affecting emotional ambivalence, Mazza writes dialogue, particularly for Leya, that’s annoyingly talky and self-conscious. Still, the author shines in her descriptions of nature and her feel for wildlife. The solution she leads Brian to in the powerful drama of a cougar that hasn’t adjusted to relocation according to human standards is particularly satisfying.
An ambitious but intrusively “literary” novel of people and animals, the animals this time far more interesting than the people.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-57366-092-2
Page Count: 270
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
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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