A sordidly raw, funny and oddly affecting look at two wasted lives.
A raunchy, messy debut novel about two young people not quite in love.
Right at the start of this fast-paced, foul-mouthed story, the unnamed narrator is having a horrible day: Her car has been stolen, but the 911 dispatcher sternly reminds her that the line is for emergencies only, and her boyfriend, Robert, sends her a text that reads: “Boo I’m br8ing up with u. sorry.” The hapless narrator is no poster child for innocent living: She’s not particularly bright, she’s extremely fond of drugs and alcohol, and she’s not exactly the best worker at her faceless office job. “I work at Petrus Cheong and Affiliates. I don’t know what my job is,” she says. She spends her evenings wasted; she spends her days loathing her co-workers, the people who get her coffee orders wrong—everyone, basically, except the random celebrities on TV she fantasizes about: When she thinks of actress Gwyneth Paltrow’s cooking recipes, she idly reflects, “I wish I could meet her, hang out with her, be like best friends. I’m pretty sure we’d get along great—we have so much in common.” She wants her Robert back in her life so badly that she sees no real problem with texting him back and telling him she’s pregnant; the only problem is that she then needs to get pregnant, or else she’ll run the risk of his breaking up with her again. They get back together, and the rest of the novel follows the constant zigzagging of their relationship, with Robert getting fired from one job after another, uselessly dreaming the whole time of writing a million-dollar screenplay as the narrator offers him one piece of stoned, dopey encouragement after another. Etarie peppers virtually every line of her novel with obscenities, all of them deployed with a deadpan pacing and humor worthy of Richard Price. Despite the two main characters’ flagrant shortcomings, Etarie’s skill at portraying their brainless, aimless hope actually generates sympathy where none should exist.
A sordidly raw, funny and oddly affecting look at two wasted lives.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0988051515
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Murder Island Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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