The language is gorgeous, the tone exquisitely highbrow, but the result is disappointingly dull.
In parallel but unconnected narratives, Irish novelist Park (The Light of Amsterdam, 2012, etc.) portrays the inner lives of three women—two historic, one fictional—who have devoted themselves to their difficult husbands’ creative needs and ambitions.
The women’s stories follow the same pattern of early passion evolving into long years of travail and sacrifice. Aging widow Catherine Blake remembers her life with prophetic poet William Blake: his yearlong courtship filled with letters she was too illiterate to read; their romantic early marriage; a miscarriage followed by the threat of Blake’s passion for another woman (a not historically proven event); their three-year stay in Sussex, Blake inspired by seeing a tiger and a comet. Catherine revels in being William’s student, his assistant and his succor against a public that thought him more madman than genius. Unlike Blake, Osip Mandelstam was recognized as a genius in his lifetime, but writing poetry in Stalinist Russia was a political act, and his words were considered inflammatory. In 1939, Osip’s wife, Nadezhda, waits in line to send the exiled Osip a package before her story bounces forward and backward in time to earlier exiles and tribulations the couple shared and to the future in which Nadezhda must survive alone while preserving Osip’s banned writing. Like Catherine Blake, the childless Nadezhda dedicates her life to supporting her husband’s genius, acting as his scribe and suffering his infidelities as minor irritants. Fictional Lydia is the new widow of Don, a contemporary Irish poet who never achieved greatness before his fatal heart attack at their seaside cottage. Unhappily married for years, Lydia remains ambivalent toward Don as husband and poet. He was a womanizer and an uninvolved, resentful father to their son and two daughters. Now Lydia gathers with her adult daughters to spread Don’s ashes and deal with the maternal grief she had never been able to articulate over her son, who died years before.
The language is gorgeous, the tone exquisitely highbrow, but the result is disappointingly dull.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62040-524-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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