A cautionary tale for aging boomers that mixes (with a heavy hand) myth, satire, and morality as it details a self-absorbed New York lawyer's brush with immortality. John Ashe is 50 years old, successful, and rich—but not happy. A partner in a prestigious law firm, he's all too aware of time's winged chariot as partners drop dead jogging, wife Elizabeth nixes martinis, and bran cereal becomes his breakfast of necessity. Commuting on the train to suburban Groveton is the pits, too, and the running that gave him some pleasure is becoming increasingly painful as his tendons play up. And John knows it's only going to get worse. But then potential paralegal-hire Elena comes by for an interview—and his life changes as magically as any poor slob's in a fairy tale. Though she's the daughter of a law-school classmate, and only 22, John is infatuated—as is Elena, who admires her elder's legal knowledge and maturity. The two are soon lovers—very energetic ones—and John finds himself amazingly rejuvenated: He can eat, fornicate, and run like a young man. Furthermore, his hair darkens, his muscles tighten, and his cholesterol drops. The doctors think he may be suffering from ``youthing,'' the result of an older man's sexual relationship with a younger woman. Meantime, he leaves Elizabeth, who soon takes up with the wronged wife of a friend, having decided that same-sex love is better. An exuberant John also decides to leave his firm. But when he becomes a medical celebrity, Elena begins to have second thoughts: John seems so immature and shallow now. When he wins the New York Marathon, she leaves for L.A., and John immediately begins to age again. Another young woman, however, is waiting in the wings. An intriguing concept, and an acute take on the '90s zeitgeist, but this first novel's punch is weakened by clunky and pedestrian writing.
Pub Date: April 7, 1997
ISBN: 1-55611-511-3
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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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