Smith (When Venus Fell, 1998, etc) has a real affection for folk artists and rural characters, but even so her story suffers...
A Brooklyn artist creates a scrap-metal sculpture of a giant bear for a small Georgia community—and, years later, his grieving son heads south to find his father’s masterpiece.
The Powell clan—poor farmers and folk artists—believe that a bear sculpture will serve as a protective totem against the polio epidemic that has crippled and killed so many local children and adults. According to the half-remembered teachings of their long-dead Granny Annie, that is, who was part-Cherokee. Another superstitious relative has a load of scrap metal shipped to the Brooklyn studio of Richard Riconni, an unrecognized genius whose saintly young sister died in an iron lung. Riconni sets to work, using leg braces to create the Iron Bear’s armature and a tractor carburetor for its heart. When the finished sculpture finally arrives in Tiberville, many deride it, but others love it—including the current head of the Powell clan, who even gives his newborn daughter a bearish name, Ursula, to commemorate the day. She grows up healthy and happy on the Powell farm located on (where else?) Bear Creek, playing around the Iron Bear, which her father eventually bought and moved to his land, though at a terrible cost: he then couldn’t afford medical care for Ursula’s mother, who died in childbirth as a result. The baby boy she leaves behind is further afflicted with autism, able to communicate only with the Iron Bear, which speaks to him in the voice of his dead mother. Enter Quentin Riconni, a handsome hunk inspired by his father’s violent death to a quest for the Iron Bear. Ursula won’t part with it, of course—and Quentin falls in love with her and begins welding his own sculpture, Bear Two.
Smith (When Venus Fell, 1998, etc) has a real affection for folk artists and rural characters, but even so her story suffers by remaining—well, improbable.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-316-80077-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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