From the author of Crossover (1992), a competent if heavy- handed celebration of family: a melodramatic second novel that tries to be jazzy in style but often stumbles into jivey shorthand, a clichÇd vocabulary more suited to Afro-American sitcoms than fiction. Williams opens daringly enough, with a story written by one of his characters—a nostalgic misadventure by two brothers that clearly prefigures the struggles in the novel. Quincy and Elliott Crawford live with their war-widowed mom in Boston, where she eventually marries the hard-working Derek Davis, a social worker born in Barbados, who has little use for ``the white man'' and causes a family crisis when he proposes adopting the boys. While Quincy leaves home at 16 rather than change his last name, the younger Elliott submits to Davis's regime—which means, among other things, being shaped into a basketball star, though his pro career chances are ruined by a college injury. Meantime, Quincy graduates from Columbia and begins his career as a teacher, writer, and Casanova. Back in Boston, their half-sister Delphine gets caught up in the school-busing crisis that convulsed that city in the mid- '70s, and her prom night develops into an event that defines the family bond. During the prom, several white students attempt to rape Delphine, and her family (even the long-estranged Quincy) comes to her side. The hard-won reconciliation helps them all decide how to lead their lives in the future, which includes accepting various responsibilities for others, blood relatives or not. Quincy's dramatic death in the penultimate chapter overstates his own shift in character, carrying him from irresponsible stud to savior of a little boy. Williams clearly hopes to develop a counter-image to media tales of parentless predators and shiftless black men, and in that regard he's done well. Solid, if somewhat humorless, work. (First serial to Essence magazine)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-82713-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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