A meandering but often funny and entertaining picaresque about the Mormon faith.
Mormon missionaries encounter hard times and a Mephistophelian menace in von Osten’s (This Happy Life, 2013, etc.) raucous coming-of-age satire.
In 1967, with the Vietnam War raging, plenty of young Mormon men try to escape the draft by undertaking two-year missionary stints for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But John Gaumless, a Salt Lake City native whose high draft number makes him exempt from call-up, has genuinely spiritual motives, stoked by his high-minded girlfriend, Marylou. Alas, his time proselytizing in Northern Ireland gradually erodes his illusions about the church. The Irish people, Protestant and Catholic alike, respond to Mormon overtures with curses, hurled rocks and tossed chamber pots. The mission’s president is a feckless man who spends his time feeding his swans as his seething wife and scheming underlings plot petty power plays. Bored, lonely, cold and depressed, the other young missionaries transgress the Mormon strictures against alcohol and engage in back-stabbing rivalries and furtive gay trysts. John, a floundering innocent, finds his only friend in Orson Roundtower—a handsome, sardonic Brigham Young University basketball star who prefers Dostoevsky to the Book of Mormon and regards LDS doctrine with bemused contempt. (At one point, Roundtower ups his conversion numbers by bribing an Irish family to undergo Mormon baptism in exchange for bottles of orange Fanta.) John finds Roundtower to be an island of relaxed urbanity in a sea of hypocritical dogmatism, but as their relationship intensifies, he starts to wonder why villagers flee from his friend—and why so many missionaries keep dying in his vicinity. Von Osten’s sendup of Mormon doctrine, rituals and culture is detailed and cutting. Marylou’s antic letters to John, stuffed with Mormon piety and ditzy uplift—“When the tough get going, the going gets tough!”—are particularly hilarious. The book’s portrait of bedraggled teenage missionaries, feigning religious ardor as a coverup for self-interest and bureaucratic inertia, is well-observed throughout. The narrative does feel somewhat aimless, though, except when Roundtower takes center stage with his debonair charisma, rakish humor and unapologetic mischievousness. Before Roundtower’s villainy subsides, a bit disappointingly, into mere melodrama, he presents a compelling case for why deviltry remains such an appealing alternative to holiness.
A meandering but often funny and entertaining picaresque about the Mormon faith.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500668648
Page Count: 356
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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