Well-crafted and honest.
Menapace (Letting Go of Mama, 2011) crafts a coming-of-age story that builds slowly but unfolds profoundly.
With a carefully balanced mix of harsh earnestness and dry humor, Jasper Windsock Jr. tells the story of his lifelong friend and occasional rival, Ramedio Kunstler. The bulk of the drama, which develops over the course of the 20th century in Pennsylvania’s coal country, derives from bitter, generations-old feuds among the Italian immigrant families that populate the Valhalla area. Reputations and political alliances are of the utmost importance, but in his early days, these issues seem to be of no concern to Ramedio. After tragically witnessing his father’s suicide, Ramedio is raised by his mentally unstable mother, Ramona, and his intelligent, if heavy-handed, stepfather, Dr. Walter Kunstler. Ramedio develops a love for music at an early age and, in his teenage years, decides that he and his band, Ramedio and the Rangers, are destined for stardom. But before the Rangers can really take off, he gets 17-year-old Martina Cardinelli pregnant. Following the demands of his stepfather, Ramedio marries Martina and is instantly embraced by her family; he loves Martina and feels more loved by her family than his own. However, none of this can last in their spiteful, clan-based society. The Kunstlers and Cardinellis clash while Ramedio struggles to make enough money as a musician. In the ultimate tragedy, Martina falls completely out of love with Ramedio. As Ramedio tries in vain to regain the love of his wife, Windsock recalls all the heartbreaking details. The events that follow, with Ramedio fleeing the town and returning to his music, are rendered with a surrealistic style and an air of irreverence that serve as a welcome release from the tense preceding chapters. The novel’s first half unfolds at a slower pace, but that proves to be Menapace setting the stage for the extremely gratifying series of resolutions, and nonresolutions, that follow.
Well-crafted and honest.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475250695
Page Count: 298
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 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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