The lovers’ high-wire act, in the final third, is gripping, the earlier stuff, like Reba copping drugs, merely titillating....
Farm girl becomes supermodel in actor Bogosian’s dark, raunchy second novel (after Mall, 2000), about sex and drugs in the big city.
Reba Cook is 20 when she loses both parents to cancer, leaving her alone with older brother Billy on their failing farm in upstate New York. She gets no comfort from her brother, a hard-drinking bully ashamed of lusting after her, or from her new boss, Frank, a bank manager unhappy with her oral sex technique. One Saturday in the city, selling their apples at the market alongside Billy, she allows herself to be picked up. The guy deflowers and discards her in short order. A second guy hits on her at a McDonald’s, and this time Reba lucks out. Paul is a fashion photographer who sees the potential in this leggy blonde with beautiful eyes. In a heartbeat, she has an agency contract and becomes an overnight sensation. But this isn’t just Reba’s story. There’s also Rick, a 45-year-old doctor with a lucrative private practice, a happy family in the burbs, and a raging midlife crisis. He has a swell wife in Laura and two sweet kids, yet he yearns to run wild, though so far all he has managed is a Portnoyesque involvement with his penis (there are three masturbation scenes). He gets a shot at liberation when Billy becomes his patient. If Reba has ascended to its heights, Billy has hurtled implausibly into the city’s depths, and, now a violent derelict, he’s been razor-slashed by drug dealers. Late in the story, Rick and Reba meet to discuss her brother. Reba is snorting heroin and sleeping around, and reckless doctor and needy model launch themselves into a grand passion. Will it consume them?
The lovers’ high-wire act, in the final third, is gripping, the earlier stuff, like Reba copping drugs, merely titillating. Not surprisingly, Bogosian has a fine ear: more dialogue and fewer interior monologues might have made for a leaner, more powerful tale.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-3588-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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