While this book could be more concise, the protagonist’s story of rebuilding his life in the South remains appealing.
A New York office worker’s chance encounter with a mysterious woman on a train upends his life in this debut novel.
Gary Norton works for L&S Import Export Company in Manhattan and commutes home to Connecticut every day on the 5:01 p.m. train. His boring work routine and dull commute are enlivened slightly by an enigmatic woman he spies on the train. Trying to chat her up, he strikes out as she initially rebuffs him, but after several days of seeing her, they go out for drinks. It becomes clear to Gary that this woman, Julie, and her associate at a bar are mixed up in the drug trade. One evening, the police arrive at the train station and arrest her. Dismayed, Gary thinks instead of a co-worker, Susan, who has shown some interest in him. After a few dates, there seem to be some possibilities for the two romantically, but Gary encounters the police on the way home one day, and they arrest him. The police have video of him carrying Julie’s bag, and he is pressured into pleading guilty to drug possession. Freed, Gary loses his job and leaves town, heading south, seeking a new life. At a restaurant in North Carolina, he meets the owner, Sarah Dorsey, a matronly widow, whose down-home charm and kitchen-sink realism are magnetic enough to keep Gary in town. He begins cooking for the restaurant, torn between whether he is starting a new life in North Carolina or just spending time on his own before reuniting with Susan in Brooklyn. As people begin to get their hooks into Gary in the South, drama near and far threatens his plans to reshape his future. The novel has plenty of entertaining storytelling on display, and this tale of an unassuming man caught up in multiple extraordinary events is an engaging one. Depictions of supposedly coldhearted New York as opposed to the warmth of the South manifest themselves mainly in Sarah’s restaurant, the community’s heart and soul, and Kopet creates colorful characters who almost always have motives. The drug subplot keenly critiques America’s beastly criminal justice system. Gary’s struggles, both economic and romantic, are universal and fit well into the ever evolving storyline. The novel does have some excess bulk, however, and a leaner version could have offset some methodical writing toward the end.
While this book could be more concise, the protagonist’s story of rebuilding his life in the South remains appealing.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4414-6719-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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