A carefully composed, tautly executed debut collection of 16 interlocking stories that poses a collective riddle: How does the '90s gay man who has fled his family recover a lost domestic ideal, even if he never had it? Scanlan's answer is deceptively simple: friends and lovers. Beginning with ``Family Album,'' the author signs up his protagonist, Freddy, for a lifelong sequence of dance lessons. The child of a classic traumatizing marriage (reticent alcoholic father, melodramatic alcoholic mother), Freddy, with his affection for musicals and dolls, fits into any of a number of gay clichÇs, none of which Scanlan is off-guard enough to let control the development of his main character. A trip with his mother to Nashville to visit her parents does nothing to soothe Freddy's preadolescent uneaseintimations abound that his grandfather molested Mom while Grandma turned a blind eye. In ``Cigarettes,'' an older Freddy is relieved when his parents bawl him out for stealing his mother's cigarettes, not for kissing the rude boy whom he steals them for (they never catch him in the transgressive act). ``Gold'' and ``Banking Hours'' prepare Freddy to escape to New York, and ``Red Light'' and ``The Clutch'' chronicle what happens once he gets there: waiting tables, doing standup comedy, and taking a lover who works for Andy Warhol. The remaining pieces follow Freddy's adult life in the age of AIDS: His parents get old and become sadly benign, though no less affecting (``Fallingwater''); he travels to Paris with a dying lover (L'Attrape de Coeur''); he reunites with a friend, worse off than he, who finds in Freddy a reason for melancholy envy (``Tattoo''); and, in the title story, he contends with post-AIDS dating. The collection ends weakly, with Freddy trysting in Anne Frank's secret annex during a visit to Amsterdam (``In Anne Frank's House''). A lot like sabotaged Halloween fruit: austere, appealing surfaces conceal razor blades that, through Scanlan's graceful alchemy, defy rust. Stylish, relevant writing.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55583-287-3
Page Count: 207
Publisher: Alyson
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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