Relentlessly trashy and profane, name-dropping and scandal-mongering.
Veteran novelist Dann (Counting Coup, 2001, etc.) wonders how different things might have been if James Dean had survived his 1955 automobile accident.
Unfortunately, the author hasn’t so much “imagined” the actor’s post-crash life as plunked him down in a Harold Robbins–style tale of gratuitous sex, ambition, and famous people behaving badly. Already a boozer before his car crash, Dean discovers a young, mumbling Elvis Presley among his bedside visitors. He emerges from the hospital addicted to painkillers and internationally famous as the star of Rebel Without a Cause. The shallow, mostly clueless Dean moves to New York City, harboring ambitions to direct films. He shrugs off his gay lovers and meets Jack Kerouac, who later writes a screenplay of On the Road for him. An earlier screenplay about Billy the Kid has Dean and director Nick Ray dickering with Colonel Tom Parker over Presley’s participation; in the first of a very few amusing turns, Elvis agrees to star because he wants to be taken seriously as an actor. (A scene of Dean and Elvis racing slot car replicas of the vehicles they previously trashed is one of the other all-too-rare gems sparkling amidst the dross.) Dann is so eager to pile on the sex ’n’ sleaze that he never lets us see Dean doing what we're told he does best: act in films. While defending Marilyn Monroe from an abusive Joe DiMaggio, Dean decks Frank Sinatra at Chasen’s. Marilyn leads him to Bobby Kennedy, who wants Dean to make a movie about him. Dean can’t prevent Monroe’s suicide and suspects Bobby Kennedy might have had something to do with it. He acquires her secret diary, only to have it pried from his grasp by Bobby. The two work out a truce, brokered by Ethel, providing an entry for Dean into politics. The arbitrary climax hints that the brooding Byron from Indiana could have beaten the Kennedys at their own game.
Relentlessly trashy and profane, name-dropping and scandal-mongering.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-380-97839-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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