A captivating postmodern murder story.
A cerebral drifter makes sense out of the madness in his life in this debut novel.
Robert Robillard, a 23-year-old self-styled artist whose mind moves a mile a minute, is considering suicide but decides to just leave Los Angeles instead. He begins a metaphysical journey around the American Southwest, pondering such heady topics as life, death, morality, and existence while experimenting with a few trespasses against the laws of God and humanity. He gets caught stealing and is forced to murder his way out of the situation, only to be filled with intense remorse and fear over the deaths of the two people he’s killed: “I was now a murderer and it would forever weigh and sit and hang over who I was and who I was to be.” Robillard’s ruminations on the nature of freedom and expression—which were previously largely philosophical exercises—take on a new urgency as he seeks to escape punishment for his crimes and settle his affairs before fleeing to Montreal to live under a new identity. To do so, he’ll have to make peace with the person his actions have forced him to become—and escape the vengeance of the father of his victims. Robillard narrates the book in an ellipses-laden, Joycean stream-of-consciousness style that Hunter calls Chaos Riddle Prose: “Shoe to killer in Connecticut … with Wet Fingers Worth of Worthiness … palms to sheiks … forehead feigned the Fool! … Touch do not! … Orion the Ore my Marina the Music! … The Music of the Spheres!” It’s a bit hard to follow, as Robillard leaps from literary reference to pun to onomatopoeic description of something happening right in front of him. Hunter’s obvious debt to various modernists feels more than a bit mannered now that Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a hundred years old. That said, there is something inherently compelling about a book that forces the reader to experience it on its own terms, and this is one such work. Hunter has created a surreally inviting wasteland in which to stage this morality play.
A captivating postmodern murder story.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4783-5381-2
Page Count: 300
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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