Strictly for die-hard fans who won’t mind that even the shootouts are rushed and muddled.
Gunslinger Johnny Fierro’s rebirth as John Sinclair, son of a New Mexico rancher, is complete. Or is it?
Far from killing Guthrie Sinclair, the man his mother, Gabriela, had fled when he was only a child, Johnny has relented and let the old man take him into his domestic establishment. But his father isn’t exactly the nurturing type. And even if he were, it’s going to take more than a few kind words to civilize Johnny, who insists on calling his half brother, Guy, “Harvard,” complains about his foster sister Peggy’s cooking, and declines to introduce himself to Guthrie’s widowed neighbor, genteel racist rancher Edith Walsh, even when he’s doing a good deed for her. And that’s just when he’s at home. Let’s not even talk about Johnny’s gunfights, which claim a total of eight forgettable adversaries, and his habit of presenting himself at Delice Martin’s Cimarron whorehouse to celebrate each time by picking out a brace of young ladies equal to the number of victims he’s just shot dead. Will Johnny ever settle down, grow up, and clean up his language? Of course he will, but not quite yet in this second installment (Dance with the Devil, 2014), which features rudimentary plotting, primitive thought processes on the parts of even the most avowedly complicated characters, and tin-ear dialogue that blithely flouts genre and period norms, from Johnny’s suave self-qualification to the widow Walsh (“if I may say so”) to the experienced madam’s admonition to Johnny (“you really are clueless”).
Strictly for die-hard fans who won’t mind that even the shootouts are rushed and muddled.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4328-3120-2
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Five Star/Gale Cengage
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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