Strangely compelling despite (or because of) the unreliable narrator, this novel will intrigue fans of the unconventional...
Debut author Pick’s Kafkaesque postwar tale about an American student at the University of London who’s a highly unreliable narrator.
In 1956, Paul Scudery, a young man from Rhode Island suffering from chronic anxiety but a healthy libido, travels to London to study British history. Impressionable and insecure, he gets caught up with England’s fading Communist Party while joining rioters in firebombing the offices of the Daily Worker. Soon, the American Embassy recruits him to spy on the local party leader, Jane Falmouth, whose daughter or niece—it isn’t made clear—becomes his lover. But was he recruited? Did his girlfriend dump him? And did he accompany fellow boardinghouse student Rolf to Vienna to volunteer at the Hungarian refugee camps, or did he stop in Mannheim and spend the week with another lover? Paul obviously has a problem separating reality from fantasy—or, perhaps, he is living in parallel universes, as Dr. Victor, his unaccredited analyst, suggests. As the young man’s accounting of events is increasingly at odds with that of his friends, it becomes clear the reader can no longer trust him. He is studious and polite; he is sexually aggressive and explosively violent. Which is the real Paul? Even his landlord’s dog alternately cozies up to him and attacks his ankles. Maybe he has a doppelgänger, as the hapless Dr. Victor speculates, or perhaps he’s simply suffering from an identity crisis. Author Pick has concocted a twisting narrative that reveals secrets and then tears them apart. His writing style is alternately lush and clipped, full of sentence fragments: “With the thought, I felt the first drums. Not drums. Something pounding in my head. Beyond my head. My heart struggling to remain confined within itself.” He has deftly created an atmospheric England in the 1950s—a setting that is the most reliable aspect of the book. Fittingly, toward the end, Paul’s philosophy professor turns to Jean-Paul Sartre and his theory that “reality is what the individual makes of it.” Readers may find themselves nodding their heads in agreement as the story flits from dream to reality to a climax that rapidly plunges to an existential conclusion.
Strangely compelling despite (or because of) the unreliable narrator, this novel will intrigue fans of the unconventional and exasperate those who expect tidy endings.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1478286356
Page Count: 176
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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