Contrived and sentimental, though Berg (True to Form, 2002, etc.) writes neatly packed and fluid prose.
Breaking up is hard to do, and breaking up with Santa almost impossible.
Frank Griffin has an inkling that his wife Ellen is fooling around with Peter, her basic auto mechanics course instructor. After ten years of marriage and the birth of their adorably precocious daughter Zoe, Ellen tells Frank she wants a divorce. She explains, coolly, that she never “believed in romantic love” until the ponytail-sporting mechanic came along and dazzled her. She asks Frank to move out, but he won’t budge. Problem is, he still loves her. They reluctantly agree to live as roommates, alternating nights out. In an effort to stifle the probing questions of her inquisitive eight-year-old, Ellen tells Zoe she’s taking a quilting class that often runs implausibly late. Frank throws out his wedding ring and tries directing his energies toward becoming a part-time mall Santa. More from spite than anything else, he begins dating the Christmas coordinator, Donna, a blond divorcée who is incredibly understanding of his needs. Most of the time, though, Frank sits around inventing nicknames for Peter (Oil Pan King, Mr. Points and Plugs), wallowing in the muck of his own unrequited desire for Ellen, and having exhaustive, watered-down-feminism chats with Zoe. Fed up with the fights and relentless sarcasm, Ellen decides to get her own apartment. What follows are fruitless yearnings, the immeasurable comfort of good ice-cream, overtly metaphorical dreams, bouts of self-help dating, and the limited strivings of Frank to understand where it all went wrong. The story, for all its nuances, hinges on just two questions: Will Ellen’s relationship with Peter last? Can Frank’s cunning use of passive aggression and belittling jabs lure Ellen home again? The answers arrive just in time for Christmas.
Contrived and sentimental, though Berg (True to Form, 2002, etc.) writes neatly packed and fluid prose.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-1136-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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