A disappointing sixth collection from Weaver (A World Quite Round, Getting Serious, etc.), particularly after the exuberant tour de force of his most recent novel (The Eight Corners of the World, 1988). With the exception of the novella, these seven instances of men at their emotional limits ends with Weaver's creativity at its lowest ebb. ``Under the World,'' the novella, is an inventive Vietnam fable about a short man who is recruited to infiltrate North Vietnam's vast system of underground tunnels and who decides never to come out: ``I didn't go back to The World because I wanted to keep on being who I am. Me. Huff.'' Here, there's a satisfying diversity of incident and a good deal of wordplay, as though Weaver's heart these days is in longer fictions. In the meantime, ``Whiskey, Whiskey, Gin, Gin, Gin'' is ``a kind of collage'' in which an alcoholic narrator's family history-like father, like son, carried through two generations-is structured as a pseudo-confession to a third party, presumably a counselor or therapist; ``Zen Golf'' is a familiar take on a man, failing at 43, who takes up golf to find ``wholeness.'' The plot escalates until the man loses all interest in anything but the nirvana he finds on the course, where he ``becomes'' the golf ball; ``The Good Man of Stillwater, Oklahoma'' is a slice-of- life, with pretensions to fabulism, about a man whose life as an Allstate employee is disrupted by drought, invasions of snakes and locusts, and tornadoes before a rhetorical apocalyptic finish; ``Turner's Dream'' goes inward to reveal the bleak life of a man who dreams of his dead parents and faces family problems by slipping into solipsism. At best, Weaver is struggling in these shorter fictions to find a new direction; at low ebb, but a fine craftsman work. Some of the pieces appeared in Quarterly West, Western Humanities Review, and Pushcart Prize X.
Pub Date: April 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-929968-17-4
Page Count: 248
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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