A witty, Rabelaisian road story about one man’s search for what matters.
This debut novel follows a young mountain climber’s unconventional quest for enlightenment.
The story introduces readers to Donato, a young man with a mission. After a thunderegg (a sort of geode) falls from a tree on the same day he fails to save a young calf’s life, Donato vows to find the place where souls go when they vanish. The calf’s soul “didn’t go down, it didn’t go sidewise, and it didn’t go into outer space, but it did go up.” In search of this mysterious up, Donato travels the world, first as a student, then as a Navy SEAL, then as a sculptor. His journey takes him from Oregon’s Cascade Range to Mount Bundok in the Philippines to the Dolomite Mountains outside Padua, Italy, and then back to the American Northwest. Many years and many mountains later, he is still looking for answers: “Up seemed just as elusive and intangible as ever, and I wondered if I would ever find it.” Ultimately, he does discover it, and in exactly the place where he least expected to. Among the curious characters readers meet along the way are the hero’s parents, lovable eccentrics Yango and Clotho, who tell young Donato about the mystical Nagah sheep, a bighorn who climbed down a fissure in a mountain and emerged as the North Star. Nagah serves as a sort of governing spirit for the story, an otherworldly but ultimately benevolent lodestar. Mulch writes about Donato’s search in a whimsical, absurdist style with plenty of jokes and fierce exaggerations (stones that float, an anthropomorphic tree frog, and a wise Elf who makes killer veggie burgers all appear in Chapter 15, and that chapter is not an outlier). Mulch operates here very much in the tradition of the American tall tale; there is no blue ox in the book, but there could have been. A grumpy social satire peppers portions of the tale’s second half—the author laments the yuppification of Portland, Oregon, at length. Some readers may find the jokes here underdeveloped and the satire a bit too vague but most should smile throughout this unusual adventure.
A witty, Rabelaisian road story about one man’s search for what matters.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-615-93563-8
Page Count: 252
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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