A nostalgic amble down the overgrown paths of an unhappy childhood, from the Ithaca novelist whose earlier, hard-boiled voice (Wolf Tickets, 1986, etc.) seems suddenly to have gone all runny and soft. Jerry Langley, like most sensitive boys who narrate domestic novels, is surrounded by grownups who could hardly manage to make his life more unpleasant even if that had been their intent. His father, a WASPy New York business executive, is stiff and absent- -often literally so, since he has a mistress in the city and always seems to be looking for an excuse to miss the evening train home to Connecticut. His mother drinks a lot and occasionally tries to kill herself and, although we're not told whether she took up these pursuits as a response to her husband's affair or merely added impetus to them, they don't seem calculated to win back his affections. Young Jerry's first consolation is the company of his rather wild elder brother Robert, but Robert is soon sent away to boarding school and Jerry finds himself with no one to talk to except his nanny, Miss Gilly. Eventually Miss Gilly is also sent away, and Jerry finds little solace in anything except his parents' old photograph albums, which he pores over obsessively in an attempt to understand and re-create his family's history. ``I think I wanted to do more than fill in the dark, empty places in my family's life; I wanted to change it. Of course I didn't succeed.'' Indeed not: Despite the slow anger that young Jerry kindles into a bonfire of resentment against his parents and their world, by the end he doesn't seem to have any better understanding of his feelings than at the start—a confusion of motives that devalues the narrative. No theme emerges beyond the obvious exposition of an unhappy family's unhappiness. Vivid and convincing, but ultimately so inert as to seem pointless.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-877946-71-0
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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