Yglesias’s first novel in 12 years (The Saviors, 1987, etc.) is an intense portrayal of four elderly sisters variously raging against the dying of the light in contemporary Miami Beach. The focal character is 80-year-old Jenny, who travels from her New England home to help settle the affairs of older sisters Eva and Naomi (beginning with 95-year-old Eva, each is five years older than her younger sibling), because 85-year-old Flora, an annoyingly vigorous extrovert, is too busy with her own unlikely affairs (she’s actually a standup comic working the nursing-home circuit). None of this is entirely believable, and the story’s erratic content and pacing are magnified by inordinately detailed descriptions of Miami landscapes and interiors, often presented as simple itineraries. Despite the threat of an approaching hurricane, very little happens. Jenny, always the dutiful youngest, ever the care-giver, arranges for Eva and Naomi to leave their condominiums and enter full-care facilities. Still, the novel has many impressive strengths. Jenny is an apt commentator on the trashing of contemporary culture (and Miami Beach is a wonderful target); a keen-eyed observer of such condescending horrors as “Miss Molly and Her Songs of Yesteryear . . . a very large, violently redheaded woman in an elaborately beribboned dress.” Yglesias pointedly, poignantly dramatizes the continuing imperiousness of the sex drive, even among the very elderly (Flora crows about virtually all her many boyfriends: “He’s desperately in love with me. I only hope he can get it up”); and she effectively distinguishes the personalities of the four sisters: frightened, cancer-ridden Naomi and frail, querulous, yet tenderhearted Eva are the most vividly done (Flora’s Auntie Mame—like brio is rather more of an acquired taste). Not one of Yglesias’s best, but nevertheless a thoughtful, grimly convincing portrait of old age: something of a rarity in our fiction, and a story well worth attending to.
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1999
ISBN: 1-883285-16-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an...
True love flares between two people, but they find that circumstances always impede it.
On a winter day in London, Laurie spots Jack from her bus home and he sparks a feeling in her so deep that she spends the next year searching for him. Her roommate and best friend, Sarah, is the perfect wing-woman but ultimately—and unknowingly—ends the search by finding Jack and falling for him herself. Laurie’s hasty decision not to tell Sarah is the second painful missed opportunity (after not getting off the bus), but Sarah’s happiness is so important to Laurie that she dedicates ample energy into retraining her heart not to love Jack. Laurie is misguided, but her effort and loyalty spring from a true heart, and she considers her project mostly successful. Perhaps she would have total success, but the fact of the matter is that Jack feels the same deep connection to Laurie. His reasons for not acting on them are less admirable: He likes Sarah and she’s the total package; why would he give that up just because every time he and Laurie have enough time together (and just enough alcohol) they nearly fall into each other’s arms? Laurie finally begins to move on, creating a mostly satisfying life for herself, whereas Jack’s inability to be genuine tortures him and turns him into an ever bigger jerk. Patriarchy—it hurts men, too! There’s no question where the book is going, but the pacing is just right, the tone warm, and the characters sympathetic, even when making dumb decisions.
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an emotional, satisfying read.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-57468-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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