Trivial treatment of a big subject: The author seems to be coasting on her fans’ memories and good wishes.
More angst and sex among the intricately interconnected Southern families Gilchrist (Nora Jane, 2005, etc.) has been following in fiction for nearly 30 years.
This time the focus is on 30-something cousins Winifred Hand Abadie, Louise Hand Healy and Olivia Hand. Three months before Winifred was to be married, her fiancé “perished on September 11, 2001, along with three thousand other perfectly lovely, helpless human beings.” (Gilchrist’s fondness for superlative-laden prose remains unchanged.) Louise, a TV documentary writer/producer, falls into bed and marriage with the dead fiancé’s 24-year-old cousin Carl, 12 years her junior. Carl is home visiting twin brother and fellow marine Brian, who got his chin blown off in Afghanistan. The twins enlisted after their cousin was killed; they and most of the other characters unhesitatingly support the notion that the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq are justified responses to the 9/11 attacks. In short order, Louise is pregnant and Winifred has taken up with Brian, then the scene shifts to Oklahoma. Olivia is the editor of the Tulsa World, whose publisher allows her to write cozily first-person editorials. She gets back together with ex-husband Bobby, and pretty soon she’s pregnant too. They’re married again, and Bobby’s reserve unit is called to active duty. Louise and Winifred basically drop out of the picture, except as part of the Greek chorus of extended family that comments on the action in every Gilchrist novel. With all three women married to Marines, the book is understandably concerned with war, and the author seems to intend a political point of some sort. Whatever she’s trying to say, however, gets lost in her characters’ ludicrously shallow political conversations, and in a narrative so casually developed that readers may wonder whether Gilchrist ever bothers to reread, let alone revise.
Trivial treatment of a big subject: The author seems to be coasting on her fans’ memories and good wishes.Pub Date: May 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56512-542-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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