Galef’s second (Flesh, 1995) is about a young American who goes abroad to find himself, in a novel that’s likely to sweep readers up only sporadically. Cricket Collins (his mother, who died when he was a boy, named him) is 22 when he gains his father’s disapproval by deferring law school and going to Japan instead to teach English (mainly to businessmen). Once he’s there, things aren—t propitious for those who want to like a book’s protagonist, since Cricket seems shallow and callow at once’so hostile, for example, toward the kindly but admittedly maternal dorm mother (where he first lives) that he turns to petty thievery as a way to offend her and change things. It’s gradually revealed that something deeper must be amiss with Cricket—an emotional scar left by his mother’s death? He stays in Japan far longer than he—d intended, begins learning the language in earnest, even finds a girlfriend, named Reiko—with whom (as with anyone, except himself), we discover, he can never reach orgasm, though this is a secret he lets nobody know. —Craziness and cancer,— Cricket’s father told him, run in the family—and Cricket’s attempt to escape the latter gets so curiously lost amid the steadily, slowly, ongoingly amassed details of life in Japan that the reader has little sight of purpose or of focus on the quest, sensing only the waiting, not even clearly for what. There are customs, cooking, eating, shopping, teaching, the half-marooned doings of other expats. Only very late does the novel try to declare and seize its theme (as when Cricket’s health falls apart, in a riveting trip to China), but even then there’s little sense of an organic unity—as opposed to a unity of convenience—between travelogue on the one hand and psychological journey on the other. Ambitious work, though place and person remain merely congruent, not welded, with an unsatisfying inertness as the result.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-57962-010-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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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