A light-hearted celebration of things uncool.
Australian TV writer Knight, a founder of comedy troupe The Chaser, abandons hard satire for softer emotions in his affectionate debut about a beta male finding his way.
Some youths rush headlong into adulthood, but Paul Johnson, 25, is determined to drag his feet. After graduating from law school (to the delight of his hipster parents), Paul chooses another path in life more from apathy than resolution. He makes his living as a DJ in and around Sydney, flogging wedding parties with the most cringe-inducing pop standards. “My skills wouldn’t have helped me in a pumping superclub on the fair island of Ibiza, but…give me two CD players and a box of greatest hits compilations, and I could pump up the jam, pump it up, while your feet are stomping,” says Paul. He genuinely loves music and has a talent for making it. But he’s starting to experience the embarrassment of an elongated adolescence, largely due to mockery from his good mate Nige and his best friend, the elusive and lovely Zoë. The sexual politics are lad-lit as usual: Paul beds a young companion mostly to aggravate her obnoxious older brother while he pines away for Felicity, a fellow attorney. “I was stuck, as New Order would have put it, in a bizarre love triangle—and one set to a tacky soundtrack,” Paul admits. But it’s the soundtrack and sincerity that sets the book apart from more acerbic fare like Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. We love what we love, no matter how cheesy the objects of our affections. The story might be a little syrupy here and there, but it mostly hums along as a comic novel.
A light-hearted celebration of things uncool.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-74166-626-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bantam UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the...
Hannah’s sequel to Firefly Lane (2008) demonstrates that those who ignore family history are often condemned to repeat it.
When we last left Kate and Tully, the best friends portrayed in Firefly Lane, the friendship was on rocky ground. Now Kate has died of cancer, and Tully, whose once-stellar TV talk show career is in free fall, is wracked with guilt over her failure to be there for Kate until her very last days. Kate’s death has cemented the distrust between her husband, Johnny, and daughter Marah, who expresses her grief by cutting herself and dropping out of college to hang out with goth poet Paxton. Told mostly in flashbacks by Tully, Johnny, Marah and Tully’s long-estranged mother, Dorothy, aka Cloud, the story piles up disasters like the derailment of a high-speed train. Increasingly addicted to prescription sedatives and alcohol, Tully crashes her car and now hovers near death, attended by Kate’s spirit, as the other characters gather to see what their shortsightedness has wrought. We learn that Tully had tried to parent Marah after her father no longer could. Her hard-drinking decline was triggered by Johnny’s anger at her for keeping Marah and Paxton’s liaison secret. Johnny realizes that he only exacerbated Marah’s depression by uprooting the family from their Seattle home. Unexpectedly, Cloud, who rebuffed Tully’s every attempt to reconcile, also appears at her daughter’s bedside. Sixty-nine years old and finally sober, Cloud details for the first time the abusive childhood, complete with commitments to mental hospitals and electroshock treatments, that led to her life as a junkie lowlife and punching bag for trailer-trash men. Although powerful, Cloud’s largely peripheral story deflects focus away from the main conflict, as if Hannah was loath to tackle the intractable thicket in which she mired her main characters.
Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the pages turning even as readers begin to resent being drawn into this masochistic morass.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-57721-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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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