Bacharach’s book is admirable in its aspirations but fails to deliver on most of them.
A satirical modern take on the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac.
As unfair as it may seem to use a writer’s own self-deprecating words against him, it’s hard to forget, once you’ve read the acknowledgements page of Bacharach’s (The Bend of the World, 2014) novel, the author’s admission that his agent, after reading the first draft, told him “in the nicest possible way that it didn’t make any goddamn sense.” Perhaps the final version is an improvement over that initial assay, but unfortunately, the book still doesn’t make much sense. Bacharach’s biblically inspired tale weaves together two stories, toggling somewhat confusingly among the late 1980s (or early '90s), the present day, and various times in between. Abbie Mayer, a New York–based architect of some environmentally forward-thinking renown, who, either because he has impregnated his mistress (and been caught by his wife, Sarah) and has been inspired (while attending synagogue) by a religious vision of a deer on a hilltop or simply because he needs to make a fast buck (no pun intended), moves to Pittsburgh and begins to consult for his lesbian sister’s real estate business. Sometime closer to the present day, a young woman named Isabel makes her own move from New York to Pittsburgh to work at a nonprofit called the Future Cities Institute, through which she meets Abbie and Sarah’s son, Isaac, and eventually becomes intertwined with the family, although we are left to guess at a few essential details. One of the book’s key faults is that the author takes great pains to explain some plot points (the details of a soured deal among Abbie, his sister, and their business partners are spelled out in a nearly 40-page-long arbitration-hearing transcript yet nevertheless remain difficult to grasp) and leaves others unexplained altogether (the progress of Isabel’s relationship with her love interest is especially sketchy). What's more, characters and motives often don't ring true, and Bacharach often seems to sacrifice conciseness and clarity for the sake of cleverness. To be fair, the book contains a few interesting story ingredients, but they seem ill-measured and lazily mixed and, like a haphazardly made cake, never seem to quite set.
Bacharach’s book is admirable in its aspirations but fails to deliver on most of them.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63149-174-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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