This tale of a would-be screenwriter has a funny line or two on almost every page, but debut novelist Lewis (who has both acted in films and written about them for the Los Angeles Times) hasn't quite honed her narrative skills to the level of her humor. Alice Wilder is a sharp-tongued New York heroine of the type found in the works of Nora Ephron, Susan Isaacs, et al. Transplanted to L.A., she cracks jokes to protect herself from getting hurt while toiling at a local newspaper. Her Russian ÇmigrÇ mother is the kind of woman who taught Wilder how to correctly blend in Elizabeth Arden night cream with her fingertips (``tiny dancing motions, chÇrie'') and that she should never reveal herself to men. After a brief, unhappy marriage to the son of a movie star ``famous for his suave gentleman roles,'' Wilder starts an affair with married film director Oscar Lombardi. Lombardi has four weeks before he needs to leave for Chicago to shoot some scenes, and they agree that during that time they will sate themselves to grind down their attraction to each other. Easier said than done. Wilder is also seeing Mike Pearce, a younger man studying for the bar exam and taking a stand-up comedy course. He is adoring, but she finds his youthful eagerness somewhat exhausting. Much of this is very funny, and Lewis shines at painting an entire personality with a few details, but once she has established her characters she is at a loss about what to do with them. Wilder wavers back and forth between Lombardi and Pearce, even though it's obvious from the start that over-eager Pearce is only a post-divorce dalliance and Lombardi will have difficulty leaving his wife. A frothy look at what Hollywood husbands are doing behind the backs of Hollywood wives. (First printing of 35,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-87113-586-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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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