A rare combination of technical accomplishment and generous heart.
Nine diverse stories show this Peruvian-American newcomer’s passionate involvement with his material.
Whether it’s a deadly landslide, a no-holds-barred neighborhood turf war, or a guerrilla war convulsing a nation, Alarcón jumps right in with a fearlessness that becomes his most striking quality. Six of these stories are set in Peru, three in New York City. In “The Visitor,” a man huddles with his three children, the only survivors of an Andean mountain landslide that has buried their town and their mother. It’s short, but it cuts to the bone. A poor Lima neighborhood erupts in “Flood,” but the fierce joy of a street fight pales into insignificance when the state decides to end a prison riot by burning down the institution, roasting the inmates alive. For his two longest stories, Alarcón replaces linear narrative with a mosaic from different time periods. The title piece runs from 1966 to 1989, when Fernando is killed by a bomb in the jungle. For years, he had been torn between the “bourgeois fantasies” of raising a family and the inescapable duty of fighting with the guerrillas. Alarcón limns his ambivalence with grace and power. There is no ambivalence, however, in “City of Clowns,” which first appeared in the New Yorker’s 2003 Debut Fiction issue; there’s only the dull anger of reporter Oscar, whose father Don Hugo has just died. Oscar can’t forgive his father for having left the household to start a new family with his black mistress, Carmela, or his sweetly humble mother for making a separate peace with Carmela. There’s much more to this multilayered story, where everyone in “beautiful disgraced Lima” has their own hustle. Best of the New York stories is “A Strong Dead Man,” about a Dominican teenager who struggles with his father’s death from a stroke. “Third Avenue Suicide” is a carefully observed domestic drama, but it’s left unresolved. The extremes of death and war and poverty are what impel Alarcón to his best work.
A rare combination of technical accomplishment and generous heart.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-059478-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Rayo/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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