Second Thoughts: Second Chances

Name: Second Thoughts: Second Chances
Author: D. C. Moses
ISBN: 978-1-5035-3471-1

by D. C. Moses ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2015

A delightful story filled with pleasant people in a lovely setting, though it could have been told in half as many pages.

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A meandering family saga set in small-town New York, by former creative writing instructor Moses (Train from Thompsonville, 2006).

LA-born and -bred Paul Kipnis, an art history instructor, is lured to upstate New York’s Ely College by his father’s first cousin Viktor, whom Paul had met at his mother’s memorial service. Shortly thereafter, Paul’s dramatic sister, Rachel, summons him to their father’s LA home because their father, Mitchell, suffers what appears to be a heart ailment. Paul—accompanied by Viktor, an old friend of his father’s—visits Mitchell, and the three decide on an extended stay with Viktor and his adopted daughter, Corinna, in Thompsonville, New York. Mitchell moves in, and the arrangement works remarkably well. The only conflict occurs when Mitchell suspects—accurately—that Paul has developed an attraction to Corinna, who’s engaged to the scion of a wealthy New York City Jewish family for whom an immigrant goy from a small town is just not acceptable. Paul deals with his feelings by avoiding Corinna, whose engagement to Syd Steinberg drifts on interminably, despite their estrangement and infrequent visits. Syd abandons his graduate studies and, after his brother is killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, enters the world of New York finance, a move that spells the end of his relationship with Corinna. Unfortunately, the time line becomes muddled midway through the story, with the narrative jumping from one year to another (backward and forward) for no good reason. Likewise, a solid edit is needed to clear up some narrative inconsistencies. Nevertheless, with an adeptly drawn portrayal of Thompsonville, Moses offers likable characters in an enjoyable story despite the shortage of action and plot.

A delightful story filled with pleasant people in a lovely setting, though it could have been told in half as many pages.

Pub Date: March 6, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-5035-3471-1

Page Count: 398

Publisher: Xlibris

Review Posted Online: July 30, 2015

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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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.