What's startling about this first novel is that, while white heat radiates from between the lines, Lawton presents the American presence in Vietnam as a devious gentleman's war rather than as the obscene, all-thumbs conflict it's been at the hands of previous novelists. Giles Trent is so attached to the embattled Southeast Asian country that when he finishes a Navy stint, he returns as a civilian advisor in the pacification proceedings that get underway around 1970. Becoming Deputy Ambassador Stilton's ``fair-haired boy'' (a term he dislikes), Giles is neatly positioned to take the occasional jaunt under fire, as well as to observe the subtle chicaneries of the upper military echelons sitting in Saigon amidst ceramic elephants. Many of his activities are carried on with reporter/inamorata Emily Macdonnell by his side. Meanwhile, Giles's outstanding characteristic is his ability to avoid almost any genuinely perilous entanglement (though he'd like more of one with Emily). Instead, he goes about at a casual pace, not changing, as he accumulates cynical viewpoints from other, more engaged people- -disillusioned Americans, resigned Vietnamese. In a land where secrecy is so lax that ``fizzy drinks'' stands are set up along battlefields, Giles talks to the wily Vua Noi Lao, who takes no sides—or, depending how you look at it, all sides. He visits the common-law widow of Nathaniel Bummpo Jones to hear how she sizes up attitudes and prejudices as a native. He's also in on decision- making that affects the invasions of Cambodia and Laos—eventually taking his own chancy, atypical step. It's Giles to whom the Deputy Ambassador says of a meeting with Richard Nixon: ``His speech was all bathos and self-pity. It was coarse. It was full of racial and religious epithets. Damn it, a gentleman doesn't say certain things.'' Lawton, a former Marine who served in Vietnam and who was himself a civilian pacification officer, has an axe to grind, but, here, he does so with an exceedingly polished, different fineness.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-15-100171-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an...
True love flares between two people, but they find that circumstances always impede it.
On a winter day in London, Laurie spots Jack from her bus home and he sparks a feeling in her so deep that she spends the next year searching for him. Her roommate and best friend, Sarah, is the perfect wing-woman but ultimately—and unknowingly—ends the search by finding Jack and falling for him herself. Laurie’s hasty decision not to tell Sarah is the second painful missed opportunity (after not getting off the bus), but Sarah’s happiness is so important to Laurie that she dedicates ample energy into retraining her heart not to love Jack. Laurie is misguided, but her effort and loyalty spring from a true heart, and she considers her project mostly successful. Perhaps she would have total success, but the fact of the matter is that Jack feels the same deep connection to Laurie. His reasons for not acting on them are less admirable: He likes Sarah and she’s the total package; why would he give that up just because every time he and Laurie have enough time together (and just enough alcohol) they nearly fall into each other’s arms? Laurie finally begins to move on, creating a mostly satisfying life for herself, whereas Jack’s inability to be genuine tortures him and turns him into an ever bigger jerk. Patriarchy—it hurts men, too! There’s no question where the book is going, but the pacing is just right, the tone warm, and the characters sympathetic, even when making dumb decisions.
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an emotional, satisfying read.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-57468-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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