An inviting dilemma-popping tale detailing the considerable time-after-time misfortunes of a Victorian family from the 1830's on—and the cheerfully impossible chances that bring resolutions— by the author of several novels published in the 1950's and 60's (including the movie-and-TV-sitcom-bound Belvedere). The Wrox-Hampdens, situated in their massive, ill-kept estate, are a grim-to-restless lot. With much pain and distaste, Maria, wife of slovenly horse-and-hounds squire Arthur, has given birth to twins. She soon sees to it that infant Edward is given to a relative to be raised by a severe, thick-skulled cleric and his horrid wife; and at the age of three, Letty will be stolen by gypsies. Meanwhile, eldest daughter Lucy, rangy and disagreeable, mellows with a chum—James, 7th Viscount Edge—and indulges in friendly sex; pregnancy, of course, is the result. This ends the friendship of Maria and Lady Edge, James's dutiful mother; sends Maria, Lucy, and pretty daughter Marietta to Rome (where one finds death); and brings into delightful proximity (all by chance) Marietta and James. Back home, the local sleuthing constable credits squire Arthur's demise to a malicious ghost—a direful event following close after Arthur's rape of sweet governess Elsie. Her rescue is achieved by the upright tutor Osbert (one of the few stout oaks amid the weak reeds here). Son Arthur takes over and deftly handles younger siblings' messes; nasty secrets are finally aired. As for the twins, are they forever gone? Of course not. Despite shameless use of coincidence, and not particularly endearing people: an entertaining and engrossing period tale in which all goes wrong and finally all goes right.
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1993
ISBN: 1-55611-373-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
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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