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THE PEARL OF RUBY CITY

Name: THE PEARL OF RUBY CITY
Author: Jana Harris
ISBN: 0-312-19315-7

by Jana Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 19, 1998

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The author’s second novel (Alaska, 1980) is set in Ruby City, a Washington State mining town, in 1893. Young Pearl Ryan has fled there, escaping the false charge back in New York that she stole her employer’s diamond necklace. In Ruby City she runs the Laundry by the Lake, helped by Mary Reddawn, a Siwash Indian, and Mary’s husband, Chin. Saving her earnings for medical school Pearl also assists Doc Stringfellow when the need arises. They—ve been unable to save much-loved Mayor —Shaky— MacDonald from what the doctor has diagnosed as typhoid. His death is quickly followed by that of Jake Pardee, owner of the gambling hall and Trading Post, killed by a shot in the back. The mayor’s close friend Dutch Wilhelm is the next to sicken and die, with more mysterious deaths to follow. Pearl is determined to find out what’s behind it all, and she succeeds, even as she discovers the betrayals of her own past. Harris’s choppy narrative, packed with local color, determinedly eccentric characters, and nasty confrontations, never achieves flow or focus. Best enjoyed by fans of the Old West.

Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1998

ISBN: 0-312-19315-7

Page Count: 368

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TREE OF SMOKE

by Denis Johnson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2007

It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family...

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Within the current political climate, the reader might expect a new novel about the war in Vietnam to provide a metaphor for Iraq. Yet Denis Johnson has bigger whales to land in his longest and most ambitious work to date. Tree of Smoke is less concerned with any individual war than with the nature of war, and with the essence of war novels. There are echoes here of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (particularly as transformed by Francis Ford Coppola into Apocalypse Now) and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, yet Johnson’s achievement suggests that each generation gets the war—and the war novel—it deserves.

At the center of Johnson’s epic sprawl is Colonel Francis Sands, the novel’s Captain Ahab, a character of profound, obsessive complexity and contradiction. Is he visionary or madman, patriot or traitor? Dead or alive? Or, somehow, all of the above? Because the reader perceives the Colonel (as he is reverently known) through the eyes of other characters, he shimmers like a kaleidoscope of shifting impressions. His military involvement in Asia preceded Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and he has continued to operate as a CIA agent within the shadows of Vietnam, while perhaps answering to no authority higher than his own.
From World War II through the war in Vietnam, much has changed—allegiances and alliances, public sentiment, the modes of modern warfare. Yet the Colonel hasn’t—he won’t or he can’t. Though he is plainly the novel’s pivotal figure, Johnson spends more time inside the psyche of the Colonel’s nephew, William “Skip” Sands, whose father died in action and whose enlistment extends a family tradition. He’s as naïve as the Colonel is worldly, as filled with self-doubt as his uncle is free of it, but he ultimately joins his relative in psychological operations against the enemy—whomever that may be. Eventually, he must decide whether it is possible to serve both his legendary relative and his country.
A less engaging subplot concerns half-brothers Bill and James Houston, who enter the war as teenagers to escape their dead-end lives in Arizona. Where the Sands family operates on the periphery of the war, the Houstons are deep in the muck of it. Though they are what once might have been called cannon fodder, the war gives their lives definition and a sense of mission, of destiny, that is missing back home—which will never again feel like home after Vietnam.

It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family that one chooses is ultimately more important than the family into which one happens to be born. Thus it is all the more imperative to choose wisely—and all the more difficult, given the duplicity that the war seems to require for self-preservation. As the novel obliterates all distinctions between good and evil, allies and enemies, loyalty and betrayal, it sustains the suspense of who will survive long enough to have the last word.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007

ISBN: 978-0-374-27912-7

Page Count: 624

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST

by Ken Kesey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1962

Though extension is possible, make no mistake about it; this is a ward and not a microcosm.

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This is a book which courts the dangers of two extremes.

It can be taken not seriously enough or, more likely, critical climate considered, too seriously. Kesey's first novel is narrated by a half-Indian schizophrenic who has withdrawn completely by feigning deaf-muteness. It is set in a mental ward ruled by Big Nurse—a monumental matriarch who keeps her men in line by some highly original disciplinary measures: Nursey doesn't spank, but oh that electric shock treatment! Into the ward swaggers McMurphy, a lusty gambling man with white whales on his shorts and the psychology of unmarried nurses down to a science. He leads the men on to a series of major victories, including the substitution of recent issues of Nugget and Playboy for some dated McCall's. The fatuity of hospital utilitarianism, that alcohol-swathed brand of idiocy responsible for the custom of waking patients from a deep sleep in order to administer barbiturates, is countered by McMurphy's simple, articulate, logic. This is a thoroughly enthralling, brilliantly tempered novel, peopled by at least two unforgettable characters. (Big Nurse is custom tailored for a busty Eileen Heckert.)

Though extension is possible, make no mistake about it; this is a ward and not a microcosm.