A sparkling demonstration of Hollywood’s hold on our fantasies—and its awkward fit with our earthbound selves.
Garbo, Brando, Sean Connery . . . the stars are out in one Ottawa home that’s experiencing video heaven.
Canadian Hay follows her widely praised first novel (A Student of Weather, 2001; Small Change, stories, also 2001) with this investigation of love and romance on-screen and off. Harriet Browning’s dad would not let his kids watch movies. Maybe that’s how her “disease of video love” took hold. Now, in 1997, she’s a middle-aged housewife and part-time teacher, married to architect Lew Gold, with two preteen kids, Kenny and Jane, movie-lovers both. Harriet and Kenny wallow luxuriously in film lore; only Lew is unaffected by movie mania, as he waits patiently for his wife’s return. But Harriet is an insomniac, and she’s also writing (but not mailing) letters to the New Yorker’s redoubtable Pauline Kael: a melancholy woman, Harriet, but also smart, sympathetic, and a devoted mother. Does she like movies because “she could love someone who . . . didn’t know her . . . but not someone whose face had been blurred and compromised by dealing with her”? That’s the heart of the matter. The question takes on new urgency with the arrival among their eccentric neighbors of feisty Dinah Bloom, a single woman, older than Harriet but still attractive; she too is a movie-lover, and joins the club. In fact, she falls in love with the whole family (as does the reader), while noting the dangerous imbalance in the marriage as she and Lew are drawn to each other. Additional complications follow, thanks to Harriet’s self-invited houseguest Aunt Leah, who reeks of malice (she’s the widow of a blacklisted screenwriter), and her bearlike stepson Jack. Will Dinah and Lew make the leap into adultery? Or will she settle for being Jack’s fourth wife (he’s wooing her with roses)? We can sense Hay letting her characters guide her through the muddle; the result is a variety of hard and soft landings.
A sparkling demonstration of Hollywood’s hold on our fantasies—and its awkward fit with our earthbound selves.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58243-291-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
