Nine colorful interrelated stories tracking the romantic ups and downs of Faith, a Generation X-er on the verge of 30, and the three men she's attracted to. In ``Perfume,'' Faith is a twentysomething aspiring actress, just arrived in New York and working as a perfume spritzer in Bloomingdale's, when she meets a married man and flies to Cannes with him. She comes back early and alone, however, having seen that, for her, using even a little bit of the arts of the hookers she's encountered in Cannes is too much. In ``Likewise,'' Faith and the same man, Lenny, now divorced and Faith's boyfriend, argue loudly in an art-print shop about Lenny's lack of commitment and his other women, and are thrown out. In ``Fireflies,'' Faith hears from Lenny on a steamy summer afternoon, six months after they've broken up, and is tempted to take him back but instead impulsively pursues a boy she's run into from her hometown in Virginia. The next three tales, ``Ornithology,'' ``Faith'' and ``Winging It,'' cast an oblique, interesting light on Faith's decision to give up both Lenny, who keeps trying to woo her back without promising to be faithful, and Sandy, the hapless Virginia boy who, it turns out, has moved to New York not to study ornithology at Columbia, as he had told her, but to track down Faith, whom he's loved obsessively since childhood. He wins her briefly but can't hold on to her. The last trio of stories, which bring Faith to the threshold of marriage with an endearing X-er lawyer from Philadelphia named James, are enlivened by Tippens's sympathetic portraits of her male characters, including, in the final piece (``Back from the World''), poor Sandy, who's gone home to become his town's official handyman and resident eccentric. He's a surprisingly poignant and memorable character in a very personable and surprisingly moving collection. Impressive work from a promising new writer.
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-57322-528-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© 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.
