A first novel from the Brooklyn-born Schwartz, based in the Netherlands since 1965, that may lead some to think that art historians should stick to art and leave the suspense to more accomplished storytellers. Schwartz (Rembrandt, 1992) is nevertheless an expert both on the Netherlands and the Dutch art scene, with at least a passing familiarity with the New York gallery world, and his hero here is Lodewijk Alstad, a 29-year-old art-historian-cum-dealer hustling his way either to runaway success or utter failure. Lodewijk's fate depends on a series of sales of old- master works, and to bring about that end he has betrayed his mentor, deceived an art journal, and gotten himself embroiled in the dicey affairs of Mitchell Fleishig, a Beverly Hills real-estate magnate whose fortunes are plunging and whose future is mortgaged to the Mob. On top of all this, Lodewijk is having girlfriend troubles and suffering from periodic bouts of anxiety seemingly linked to his family's long-ago persecutions at the hands of the Nazis. Juggling deals from Houston to California, and persuading his crotchety aunt to part with a valuable painting by Emanuel de Witte, Lodewijk first bumbles and then speeds toward a fated confrontation with Fleishig's Mafia bosses, eventually stealing back the de Witte that Fleishig has desperately stolen from him, though not before evading a couple of attempts on his life. Throughout, Schwartz clogs the already clogged narrative with a dry- toned analysis of the glorious history of Dutch painting, snoozy travelogues of Amsterdam, and with a full chapter that attacks the mandarin lifestyles of scholars. Those specially interested in the Dutch masters may find a degree of allure here; readers in search of sharper plotting and more daring characters, though, may as well steer clear. If the art world were as unequivocally callow as Schwartz implies, it would have self- destructed ages ago.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-7145-3008-5
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
