Trading the Jersey suburbs of her acclaimed debut, After Moondog (1992), for the brownstones of Brooklyn, Shapiro outdoes herself to pull off an absorbing black comedy again featuring an excruciatingly muddled marriage. Here, though, as far as the bewildered bride is concerned, it’s one that quickly winds up like being on death row with every appeal exhausted. When they meet at a Manhattan dinner party, the chemistry is perfect: she (nameless) is a lonely photographer struggling to make ends meet; he, Dennis, a recently fired sociologist now working on a novel, is lonely, too—but rich. So they move in together in his brownstone and soon marry. Her photographic chronicle of the early days shows the usual blissful postcoital images, but as weeks turn into months, bruises and bandages begin to appear on both of them, and the daily routine outside the frame increasingly comes to resemble a nightmare. More than clumsy, more than messy, more than weird—more than terrifying—Dennis’s every movement leaves wreckage in its wake. In response, his spouse tries first to deny, then to cope, to no avail. When Dennis accidentally drops an iron skillet on her big toe, putting her on crutches and costing her an out-of-town photo assignment, she begins to think in terms of self-defense. By chance, she soon runs across a novelist moonlighting as a hit man, and makes arrangements to put Dennis out of her misery. She can’t go through with it, though, and so runs away instead, taking his pet albino frog with her. Lonely again, she goes back home after a week, but matters get only worse: first, the frog, then the cat, then the dog meet untimely ends, and when Dennis breaks her arm she knows with chilling certainty that it’s finally come down to her or him. Such goings-on have rarely been so outrageously, horribly funny and yet so eerily familiar: this is writing at its most nuanced and exquisite. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-316-78247-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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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