A scattered, Beat-inspired novel featuring the best-laid schemes of jazz festivals and frenzied fixes gone awry.
Alberts’ debut novel tells a story based on the true journeys of jazz artists and junkies in the 1960s.
During a period of grand experimentation with drugs and music, San Francisco jazz piano prodigy Louis Parker yearns to share the spotlight with such greats as John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Chet Baker. To be more like his heroes, he experiments with “the narcotic state” to achieve the precision, sensitivity and focus he hears in the “thick rhythmic delight of jazz.” Like them, he falls prey to addiction, confusing the excitement that floods his body when he plays music with the rushing sensation caused by injecting “the elegant toxic poison” into his bloodstream. Although the narrator claims that life’s purpose is to seek out the “mystic glue” of friendship, Louis’s sights are always on the next drug score—and a little bit of intimate companionship when the nod is over. His associates, some real and well known—Janis Joplin makes a cameo—and some not quite there, are mostly “dope fiends.” Louis tries to get high from morning glory seeds, and uses meth, pot, LSD, PCP, MDA and other drugs, but nothing quells Louis’ “hurt-the-deep, sealed-up loneliness” as heroin does. Despite Louis’ repeated attempts at getting clean and harrowing stints in the justice systems of Oregon and California—as well as Gestalt therapy sessions—Louis, like his heroes, ultimately fails. Alberts sometimes channels a spontaneous poetry worthy of Kerouac’s best, and his narrative, full of confusing, hazy, blood-spattered recollections and imaginary characters, recalls the writings of Burroughs. That said, the novel switches gears erratically from first-person to third-person points of view. Occasional inconsistencies make the book more perplexing; early on, Louis repeats the word, “exulted,” when he refers to his desire to be one of them, and 204 pages later, Louis receives his “chance to be exalted.”
A scattered, Beat-inspired novel featuring the best-laid schemes of jazz festivals and frenzied fixes gone awry.Pub Date: May 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450093217
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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