Gibson has created a larger-than-life character in Harry Christmas—who is many things but not Santa Claus, thank you very...
This book is part thriller, part farce, part Don Quixote, and has plenty of excellent writing.
Harry Christmas is drunk and on the run. He intends to bury a book of poetry on the beach in his late wife’s homeland of Venezuela as a loving last act for his Emily. But he's also running from his fiancee's deranged stepson, since he just ripped off the money she deposited in a joint bank account for their future life together. Not surprisingly, he's finally running from himself. Gibson has created an antihero of significant proportions: 58 years old, a quick wit and intellect addled by booze, bloated and raging against The Rot—“that corroding plasma of infantilisation”—which translates to anything and everything Harry sees wrong with the world. He is, in fact, running on empty. After skipping out of an elegant Caracas hotel, he takes up with Judith Lamb, an eccentric Englishwoman who sculpts penises, lying his way into her home and her bed by posing as the British author Harry Strong, whom she adores. Life with Judith is like paradise for Harry, and he even manages a running battle with her suspicious daughter, who shows up unexpectedly, but he has to go on the run again when William Slade, the maniacal avenger, appears hot on his trail. As Harry runs, bad things happen to people who trust his lies, and as he finds his wife’s hometown and falls in love with a magnificent character named Lola Rosa, disaster looms again. Judith describes the Harry she knows as “a pompous old sod but he’s got a good heart.” Her daughter pictures him as “a selfish, self-satisfied, wholly unlikable wanker.” Lola Rosa sums up a third perspective: "Aloe Vera is a special plant. If you have enemies, if someone hate you, the Aloe Vera absorb the bad energy. Since you come these two [plants] have died.” Take your pick of Harry Christmas.
Gibson has created a larger-than-life character in Harry Christmas—who is many things but not Santa Claus, thank you very much.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63450-609-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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