A year after his lawyer wife was killed in a car accident, a burglary in his house makes New Orleans film reviewer Mike Barnett wonder whether her death was really accidental. Five years before she died, Joan Barnett was hired by black developer Tom Grieve to sue real-estate mogul Sheldon Retif for withholding the right to build Thomas Jefferson Magnet High School on the site that Retif sold Grieve. Losing the case on a shaky verdict by distinguished Judge Leon Delacroix, Joan argued the appeal all the way to a procedural victory in the Supreme Court— but too late to change the location of the school (which had already been built) or help Grieve (who died soon after). Now that the burglary has alerted Mike to Joan's missing Grieve v. Retif files, though, nagging questions return. What did Retif hope to get by building the school on a plot of land the University of New Orleans had donated to the city? Why had Delacroix ruled against Joan's client? Why has Tammy Dieter-White, Joan's old antagonist in the case, forbidden her associate Johnny Chambers, formerly of Joan's firm, to talk to Mike? And what does Joan's death have to do with the current executions of gay men throughout the city? Readers who can get past the leaden badinage of Mike and Joan in extended flashback—plus the oracular wisdom of Mike's endless film reviews, heavy with liberal uplift—will find the answers satisfyingly revealing about racial politics, big-city corruption, and the self- created mythography of the Big Easy. Though it may make you impatient with the characters—how long is it going to take Mike to realize that Joan's death was no accident?—the mystery plot lends Barton (The El Cholo Feeling Passes, 1985; Courting Pandemonium, 1986) a new momentum and a cumulative power that's surprisingly moving.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-40813-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
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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