Affecting, but not engaging enough for its length.
In this novel, a woman deals with the death of a friend, an unsatisfying marriage, cross-country moves, single motherhood and a new love as she tries to build a life of her own.
Judy, mother of two young children and wife of Tony, a demanding Mexican doctor, enters a tailspin after the climbing death of a friend during a day at Joshua Tree National Park. Did he commit suicide? Could she have helped him if she’d taken the time to talk? The thought that she somehow failed him leads her to reconsider her life, agonizing over the deficiencies of a marriage that has never been ideal. Her tears push Judy farther away from Tony, whose machismo demands a smiling, obedient wife, and even leads to an act of marital rape. Claiming to be taking the children on a trip to Tennessee to visit the parents Judy rarely sees, she’s actually leaving Tony—which also means giving up the friends who have been her support. Back in the South, she must finally confront the death of her younger brother years ago, her fraught relationship with her mother, her divorce from Tony and subsequent financial worries, and the possibility of a new life with Alex, an engineer dealing with his own issues. While Judy can be compelling, her constant introspection often becomes tedious. For what is a fairly conventional story of a woman finding herself over a period of 10 only occasionally eventful years, readers may tire of so much teeth gnashing and rehashing of the past. The biblical references—the book’s parts are called “Genesis,” “Exodus,” “Song of Solomon” and “Revelation”—seem to be at odds with the repeated mention of Judy’s loss of faith. Alex’s breakdown in Hawaii comes out of nowhere, and his emotional problems disappear just as quickly. In the slow middle parts, more showing rather than telling would break up lengthy paragraphs and help make the story read less like a disguised memoir.
Affecting, but not engaging enough for its length.Pub Date: March 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481952712
Page Count: 548
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2013
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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