A moody, finely textured literary work.
Debut novelist Norman tells the story of a couple who attempt to make a home in a town with a dark history.
The independently wealthy Delano “Del” Grainger lives outside a Canadian prairie town called Edgeworthy, on land that he also rents out to a neighboring farmer. He resides there with his partner, Ivy, although the two have been having relationship troubles of late. Strange things have been happening in the area, as well; for example, a mysterious, large hunting dog, which seems to have come from nowhere, is stalking around the area, and Del’s one true local friend, English transplant Peter Fawcett, recently hanged himself. The death causes Del to question how much he really knows about the town where he lives—a place where “the locals…always asked for but did not easily disclose personal information.” At an auction of Peter’s things—his wife is selling their place and returning to Great Britain—Del finally meets the well-to-do farmer who rents his fields, a giant of a man named Walter Stevens. Walter tells the story of Del’s land, which was long the property of the local Romanoff family—and its scion, the unstable Hunter Romanoff, has sworn to get it back. Del comes to realize that Edgeworthy has secrets that he may not be able to crack. Norman’s prose is deceptively simple in style, painting the subtleties of Edgeworthy and its people in direct, muscular language. He particularly excels at dialogue: “You’ll like him,” one character says to describe another, “eventually. Most people do. Men, anyway.” It’s an intriguing take on the genre of the small-town novel, in which a brooding, silent figure is both the protagonist and a newcomer; indeed, the ways in which Norman shows these qualities to be weaknesses are surprising. Readers will experience a ghostly pleasure in watching Del move around the cold prairie locale in this slow-paced narrative, seeking answers to questions that are, in large part, about himself.
A moody, finely textured literary work.Pub Date: March 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-09-096862-3
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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