A first novel with a fascinating concept falters when it leaves the main premise behind to examine less interesting byways. Twenty-eight-year-old Martha Ward answers an ad that reads ``Wanted: Woman to talk to. Three nights a week. Three hundred dollars a night.'' For Martha, life has become an endless, uneventful endurance test. She has few friends and little responsibility; she's divorced from husband Allen—their-eight- year-old daughter Jewel lives with him and his new wife—and she has nothing much to do but show up for her inexplicable job as a topless waitress. Intrigued by the ad, she answers it and is given very precise instructions: go to a pre-reserved hotel room and put on a blue sweatsuit, blue gloves and socks, and a blue masked hood, thereby totally obscuring her physical presence. The man who placed the ad, Dr. Hamilton, wants to talk about beauty. Invigorated by her anonymity and their discussions, Martha grows to depend on the meetings as the arena in which she can be herself. Revealing to Dr. Hamilton her sad childhood—unloved by a superficial and fickle father, forever out of sync with her beautiful, mentally ill mother—Martha discusses the expectations and pitfalls of beauty. Meanwhile, she begins an affair with hunky Latino actor Reuben, a sweet guy who's obsessed with appearance. When, in quick succession, Reuben leaves her and the doctor ends their sessions, Martha is devastated—though the novel takes yet another unexpected turn before the abrupt close. Provocative issues of appearance and reality are raised here, but Wagman does little with them, dodging deeper matters by letting Martha's relationships with Reuben and flashbacks to her childhood dominate the story. A disappointing debut from screenwriter Wagman, especially considering its intriguing initial idea.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-87805-982-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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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