A funny, thoughtful campus tale.
A Georgia college professor attempts to escape the ghosts of history in Stewart’s debut novel.
Atlanta, 1996: the Olympics have just left town, and historian Travis Hemperly has returned there to take up a temporary teaching position at a historically black college. The white Hemperly’s previous teaching experience includes three years at the University of Minnesota followed by a year of performing Viking re-enactments at a tourist destination in Newfoundland, Canada—neither of which has sufficiently prepared him for a career in what Abraham Baldwin Longman, one of his new colleagues, jokingly refers to as “Blackademia”: “Travis is out of his element. He has never taught on a historically black campus, has never been a minority on any piece of real estate he has ever set foot on.” It’s a difficult transition, though one that Travis is willing to make if only because there aren’t many other options for him in the shrinking academic market. Despite cultural differences and disparate sensitivities, things begin to improve—until another colleague discovers that Travis’ conspiracy-obsessed father, Henry Hemperly, hosts the racist AM-radio call-in show “Confederate Talk Radio.” What’s more, a discussion of lynching reminds Travis of a story that his father told him when he was boy about an event Henry witnessed in the tiny village of Haylow, where a man was tied to a tree and murdered with an ax. In order to remain in his new position, Travis will have to come to terms with some history outside his area of specialization—that of his family and that of the South. Stewart tells Travis’ story in lucid, observant prose (“There is a lot to look at up in the sky tonight, a lot of action going on in the cosmos….All of this astronomical activity must mean something, so it seems like the right night for an appeal to the universe”), and he gives his novel a buoyant satirical gloss without teetering too far into ridiculousness. His characters are well-drawn and generally quite complex—even the largely unsympathetic ones—and the dialogue in particular crackles with personality. The book does drag in some sections and might have been improved with a bit of condensing. Even so, it represents an amusing and sometimes quite scathing look at academia, racial tensions, and the oppressive weight of the past that still characterizes life in the South.
A funny, thoughtful campus tale.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60489-173-7
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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