Actress/author Kagan's (The Girls, 1994) exploration of the fateful ties and traditions that bind women together, for better and sometimes for worse. Eighty-year-old Mollie Ventimiglia, who lives in Kansas City with her third husband Lew, is suffering from senile dementia and declining fast. When Gilliana, Mollie's middle-aged daughter, finds her own marriage in trouble, she decides to escape Los Angeles and head to Mollie and her own childhood home, where she is shocked to find her mother incoherent and Lew exerting every scrap of energy to give her the care she needs. When she quits L.A., Gilliana leaves not just her husband behind but 17-year-old-daughter Clare, who is naturally worried about both her parents' marriage and her grandmother's questionable health. But Clare is not her mother's, or her grandmother's, daughter for nothing; in Gilliana's absence, she grits her teeth and stays on good terms with her troubled dad, contemplates and then decides against having sex with her boyfriend, and searches for a theme for her college application essays. Meanwhile, back in Kansas, Lew and Gilliana have to decide what to do with Mollie, and Gilliana has to decide what steps to take in her own life. Over the course of the present-day narrative, Mollie and Gilliana's personal histories (and failed romances) emerge; Mollie's WW II wedding to a dashing gambler (Gilliana's father), and Gilliana's passionate affair with famous comic Anthony Ronzoni—whose untimely death left her irrevocably scarred—give Clare (who is sent for by Gilliana and present at Mollie's eventual death) insight into her own life, and help give Gilliana, on whom everybody else's fate hinges, the strength to make the decisions she has no choice but to make. Nonsensical title and strained historical references aside, an undeniable poignancy colors Kagan's attempt to show three generations of women coming to terms with each other at the end of a life. (Literary Guild selection)
Pub Date: April 12, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-43598-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
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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