that possibility, the narrative, otherwise carefully attuned to the snarls and realities of family life, cannot succeed.
A nightmare unfolds in Leebron's (Out West, 1996) ill-founded second novel, as a crack North Carolina fund-raiser feels
the heat when his wife is hit in the head with a hammer and everyone believes he did it. Warner is under a lot of pressure: new to his latest fund-raising gig in Charlotte, he's moved wife Megan and their two kids yet again in order to work nonprofit magic, yet he's barely begun when something fishy in the books casts a shadow over his efforts. His job goes on the line, the house he and Megan were about to close on is put on hold, and the normal wear and tear of family duties between two working parents suddenly seems a lot more wearing on him. And Warner has something of a temper. When Megan is attacked from behind at the art gallery she manages and is taken comatose to the hospital, her bitterly divorced, high-powered HMO-exec mother wastes no time in accusing Warner of the deed, and everyone follows her lead; the fact that he's Jewish somehow seems to matter now too. Bye-bye job, bye-bye house; hello jail and bail. Warner’s claims of innocence notwithstanding, even his parents jump on the bandwagon, remembering he long ago once hit his mother (who spent his entire childhood hitting him). Only Megan, when she finally comes out of her coma, has any doubt about Warner’s guilt, and in spite of her mother's strident protests agrees to resume living with him once she’s released from the hospital. Not that she trusts him completely, but she's willing to give him another chance—and that's enough. Unfortunately, nothing here prepares the reader to imagine Warner with a hammer aimed at his wife's head, and without
that possibility, the narrative, otherwise carefully attuned to the snarls and realities of family life, cannot succeed.Pub Date: March 23, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40640-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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