An unsatisfying, intermittently offensive melodrama.
An erotic melodrama about the rise of a poor young man to wealth and power.
Alfredo, a young man from the rough streets of Brooklyn, yearns for more from his life as the child of a single mother who works as a prostitute. This debut novel from Muenster chronicles Alfredo’s exploits in the wake of her death, as he inherits a large sum of money from his absent father and winds up finding employment as a bartender in an establishment run by women. A true ladies’ man, Alfredo finds himself with any number of prospects, but, obsessed with marrying a rich woman who will provide for him, he ultimately winds up marrying Marilyn, the considerably older owner of the bar. Unsurprisingly, their union leaves him less than emotionally satisfied, although it does lead him to a career in the entertainment industry. The novel includes extramarital affairs, blackmail and murder, to name only a few of its first plot twists, and ultimately turns to treasure hunting in the Caribbean. The narrative fails to cohere: Alfredo’s transition from struggling youth to bartender to television producer to, much later, treasure hunter, feels disjointed. The main character and female characters are poorly defined: Alfredo’s wants and desires do not feel organically generated, and the way that women simply fall at his feet is implausible. Alfredo’s ruminations on lesbian sex are typical of the book’s outdated approach to women: “He was wondering how they had sex together….He could never figure out why girls would rather be screwed by each other than by a real man.” It’s telling that one self-professed lesbian character nevertheless offers herself to Alfredo; he’s just that irresistible.
An unsatisfying, intermittently offensive melodrama.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1489530332
Page Count: 250
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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