The canned southern whimsy is rather self-consciously cute and provides gags rather than character development.
A nominally comic novel in which a Southern artist contends with his wife, his drinking, his buddies and his out-of-control life.
Sculptor Harp Spillman has been so far inside the bourbon bottle that when word comes to him he’s won a commission from Birmingham, Ala., to construct a dozen 12-foot metal angels out of nuts and bolts, he can’t remember having even applied. It turns out that he hadn’t. His wife, Raylou, applied on Harp’s behalf, believing that a healthy artistic focus—and the promise of a healthy paycheck—would help him quit drinking, at least temporarily. Raylou is a craftsman who, as narrator Harp informs us, makes “goofball face jugs” whose popularity defies rational scrutiny. “Goofball” is not a bad description of the novel as a whole, for the narrative begins with Raylou rescuing snapping turtles from a biotoxicologist. We also find out that Harp’s reputation as a sculptor is on the skids because ice sculptures he cunningly crafted for a Republican fundraiser revealed other images as they melted: a Grand Wizard under the sculpture of Jesse Helms, Mussolini under Strom Thurmond and Lucifer under Charlton Heston. Harp tries to straighten himself out through the 12-step program of Carolina Behavior but resists much of the way. Singleton sets up a series of comic plot contrivances—for example, it turns out that Frank and Joe’s metalwork business has been split up into Joe’s Nuts and Frank’s Bolts—but they don’t add up to much. This is the kind of novel in which the narrator eats Mallo Cups, Hershey Kisses and Little Debbie cakes and washes them all down with Yoo-hoo, and characters play Drunken Jeopardy, whose categories include moonshine, famous characters from Tennessee (“Jim Beam”) and whiskies with a wild-animal theme (“Old Crow,” “Wild Turkey”).
The canned southern whimsy is rather self-consciously cute and provides gags rather than character development.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-15-101307-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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