The prolific Slavitt (Short Stories Are Not Real Life, etc.) here offers three first-person narratives—one Turkish and ancient, one 19th-century and Venetian, one contemporary—in a tour de force that attempts, only half-successfully, to interlink the stories in various ways. All the pieces concern family conflicts, in particular the predicament of a son who's not the beneficiary of primogeniture. In the first, Selim, the fourth son of a Turkish Sultan (``the son of a slave, for all the women...are slaves, are they not?''), is cared for by Hyacinth, ostensibly a eunuch. Selim: ``I was told over and over again to trust strangers if I had to but fear my relatives.'' The usual fate of a younger son is death, but Selim avoids that with the help of Hyacinth and a series of misadventures Ö la The Arabian Nights. The second narrative concerns Pietro, the second son of a 19th-century Venetian noble family; again, the fate of being born second results in misadventures, here foreshadowed by the death of Pietro's uncle Giancarlo, killed in a duel, and climaxed by Pietro's attempted elopement with his brother's fiancÇe. Foiled, Pietro is sent to a monastery. In the third story, Asher, a writer and American Jew, narrates his slice-of-life (in the form of an interview) from Cambridge, Massachusetts: a family with ``delusions of dynasty,'' a divorce, and the usual panoply of 20th-century problems. Finally, Slavitt tries nobly to tie all the stories together. Variations on the themes, then, of sexual repression and cruel family expectations that can be thwarted only by rebellion. Slavitt, still gifted, still erratic, carries it off with aplomb- -even when those loose ends either don't get tied up or get explained all too neatly.
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8071-1813-3
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
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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