Solid, old-fashioned fiction updated with frank language, sex, and an underclass milieu: a natural for any reading group not...
A new arrival shakes up a group home for at-risk teenagers, in this strongly plotted and characterized latest from veteran Hower (A Garden of Demons, 2003, etc.).
Narrator Ruth Sullivan knows a fair amount about dangerous behavior from her own promiscuous, drug-addled past. Husband Mike fathered a child with an African woman before Ruth met him in Tanzania, where they ran a school before getting married and returning to the States. So they’re nonjudgmental (but not enabling) about the five girls who live with them in a state-funded residence on the bleak outskirts of New York City. Hower’s former counseling experience shows as he swiftly and cogently sketches the personalities and grim histories of overweight Darlene (whose mother is dying of AIDS), sexy Mafia daughter Gina, perennial runaway Sally (fleeing abusive parents), Native American Rose (a recovering alcoholic), and 16-year-old former prostitute Valecia. None of them are prepared for May, who blows in after “a disagreement with the cops at the Greyhound station” and tells a pack of lies about everything from her racial background to her age. She’s abrasive and provocative, leading the others in a brawl at school that gets her arrested again, but she’s also oddly vulnerable. When she brings home new boyfriend Paco, a paroled convict now counseling drug-addicted kids, the emotional and social complications set in motion threaten to destroy the home and the Sullivans’ marriage. Hower does a particularly good job of delineating their marital tensions (not enough sex, lingering resentments from previous infidelities, etc.), but he also shows the affection and commitment that still bind the couple, though neither can say for how long. His matter-of-fact portrait of the girls’ and Paco’s struggles quietly makes the point that their problems stem as much from poverty and lack of opportunity as from any personal failings. Inevitably, violence sparks the denouement, but Hower also suggests there’s hope for characters we’ve come to care about.
Solid, old-fashioned fiction updated with frank language, sex, and an underclass milieu: a natural for any reading group not wedded to middle-class domestic dramas.Pub Date: April 18, 2005
ISBN: 0-86538-114-3
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Ontario Review
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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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