The elegiac tone does little for a lugubrious love story, nor is the golfing scene on the cover likely to entice romance...
Much ado about golfing.
Ross Lansdale spends his 1950s childhood in a Catholic orphanage under the tutelage of kindly Father Martin, an avid golfer who pauses before a shot—playing in the moonlight, no less—to give this unlikely speech to the boys gathered around him: “Every love story is a small boat set upon an open sea. And those things that imperil it, the winds of betrayal, the waves of fear and doubt, are also what earn its dignity in our memory.” He also dispenses advice on how to achieve the perfect swing, which bumbling, bashful young Ross is determined to learn. Time passes. The lonely young boy grows up and becomes a lonely young English instructor with a kindly secretary named Donna, whose chirpy inquiries—“penny for your thoughts, Professor Lansdale”—trigger still more poignant soul-searching. Suffering quietly through life’s vicissitudes, hitting thousands upon thousands of balls into the air before he becomes proficient if not perfect, Lansdale thinks of more deep questions for the bored freshmen under his tutelage at Amherst. Is there love after Herman Melville? Yes! A beautiful student from a working-class background seems interested in golf. Julia’s keen thinking has been shaped by a Seven Sisters college, but she fixes cars and loves her folks—oh, the joy in her eyes when she talks about her family!—and Lansdale is overcome. And Julia looks just like a young Elizabeth Taylor, 1969-style eyeliner and all. Years pass. Love and loss loom large, as do the Old Course and championship at St. Andrews (putt, putt, and watch the birdie—lots of golf talk here). But Julia reappears, with long, silver hair, to succor Lansdale’s lonely heart and dispense kindly advice—by the light of a pale moon, of course. Filled with beauty and pain—and some very pretentious writing—Lansdale’s life comes full circle.
The elegiac tone does little for a lugubrious love story, nor is the golfing scene on the cover likely to entice romance readers.Pub Date: March 16, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-50850-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
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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