Berg could be creating a new genrethe bedside vigil novelwith last year's Talk Before Sleep and this latest, a sometimes poignant but squarely predictable story of a young wife waiting for her husband to wake from a coma. Thirty-five-year-old Jay Berman was hit on the head by a chunk of falling ice and has been unconscious for months. Now, in a nursing home and given a pessimistic prognosis by his doctors, Jay is faithfully attended by his loving wife, Lainey, who never abandons hope. She talks to him, brings spices from her kitchen to wave under his nose, does anything in her power to jolt him back into the world. Meanwhile, Lainey is feeling the stress of caring for her husband while still trying to carry on as the mother of two young daughters. In her low moments, she's helped out by occasional visits from a benign ghost and also by the very real presence of her neighbor and best friend, Alice, whose domestic woes provide ironic counterpoint to Lainey's situationAlice's husband may be walking and talking, but her marriage is comatose. Berg is especially wonderful at depicting the small revealing moments of women's friendships, the offhand sharing of secrets in the grocery store. She also sets up fine, convincing scenes of day-to-day drama in the nursing home. Still, something goes slack at the end. Like Lainey, we've never really doubted that Jay would wake up one day. But when that day comes, it's an anticlimaxnot as affecting as it should be. And Jay, who loomed so large for us in sleep, seems less real and compelling when conscious, diminished by his own happy ending. Comas can be soap-opera stuff, and though Berg is much better than that, there's still a formula finish here: Waking up is hard to do. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43745-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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