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THE WEDDING

Name: THE WEDDING
Author: Dorothy West
ISBN: 0-385-47143-2

by Dorothy West ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 6, 1995

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Now in her 80s, West—founder of the Harlem Renaissance magazine Challenge and author of a novel and many short stories—checks in with this pleasant if scattershot tale of the black bourgeoisie in a Martha's Vineyard community called the Oval. It is 1953, and Shelby Coles is preparing to marry a white jazz musician, and the Oval's inhabitants are dismayed that someone "who could have had her pick of the best of breed in her own race" would choose to marry outside of it. West then recounts the Coles family history, most of which is palatable but irrelevant. Once Shelby got lost, and, because of her light skin, the people who found her had trouble realizing that she was the child being sought. So one woman asked her point-blank whether she was "colored," and Shelby responded, "I don't know." Shelby's sister, Liz, has married a dark-skinned doctor and given birth to an equally dark daughter, who is spurned by their light-skinned grandmother. Shelby and Liz's father has had an ongoing affair with a woman for many years while keeping up appearances with his wife, but, about to turn 40, his mistress has decided to marry someone else. Another island-dweller, Lute McNeil, who has had three daughters with three different white women, has decided that he should be the one to marry Shelby, although his reasons are never clear beyond a vague desire to be a legitimate part of the Oval. These stories, full of interesting detail, work hard at interpreting racial politics, but they are all cause and no effect. When Shelby finally agrees to meet Lute the night before her wedding, there is little sense that it is a result of earlier being chewed out by her father for not having seriously considered black men as potential partners, and in turn the tragedy that follows seems random. Although written with the sure hand of a practiced short-story writer, this doesn't achieve the resonance of a deeply layered novel. (Book-of-the-Month/Quality Paperback Book clubs featured selections)

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Pub Date: Jan. 6, 1995

ISBN: 0-385-47143-2

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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by Harper Lee

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.