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
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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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