Who misses the Cold War? Rookie novelist Jones sure does. This talky, misogynist thriller churns out one spy clichÇ after another while pitting the usual Yankee badasses against a rogues' gallery of recidivist, pre-glasnost curs. With CIA double agent Jack Calumet, you get exactly what's expected from this genre: a jittery antihero who cherishes patriotism but has few qualms about loosening his canon to defy authority. Calumet has scammed the Russians into believing that he's working for them, which makes him the ideal point man, or ``Soldier Boy,'' for Operation Odyssey, an elaborate, feint-and-counter-feint scheme devised by the CIA to spirit a top Russian scientist (also spying for the Americans) out of harm's way. Sneaking around Berlin while consistently frustrating his CIA handlers and surveillance teams with brazen, unorthodox tactics, Calumet eventually contacts the urbanely malevolent Andrei Vartanyan, a Russian superspy (complete with cigarette case) who's itching to blow Calumet's cover. After a lengthy battle of wits, Calumet convinces Vartanyan that he's loyal to the resurrected communist cause—or at least such a mercenary that he couldn't belong to the CIA. This lays the groundwork for an intricate game of deception that will force Calumet to depend on all his resources, from trusted superiors to Belgian forgers and Israeli Mossad freelancers trafficking in weapons. Complications abound, however: Calumet has to wrestle with his affection for an incompetent femme fatale (in one particularly laughable scene, he ``breaks'' her allegiance to Russian military intelligence) and steer clear of European DEA agents who think he's a heroin dealer. This unnecessarily convoluted (and sometimes self-indulgent) debut culminates in a guns-a-blazin' firefight that pairs Calumet with Delta Force commando Rick Rossetti as they pursue Vartanyan and another Russian spymaster through a secret underground arsenal. Insufficient camaraderie, not enough shooting, and an excess of banter.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-11895-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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