Ambitious but disjointed and unevenly written: the parts just don’t add up to a whole.
Hagedorn (The Gangster of Love, 1996, etc.) tries to capture the upheaval and chaos of 1970s Philippines by using disparate narrative styles.
The story threads here concern an archeological discovery, a servant girl’s downfall and recovery, and the making of a movie overtly reminiscent of Apocalypse Now. In 1971, Zamora López de Legazpi, a Yale graduate and member of the Philippine elite, discovers a tribe of Stone Age cave-dwellers in the jungles of the southern Mindanao region. Zamora works to protect them from outside influences but is later accused of fabricating the tribe’s existence as a pretext to help the Marcos (though the name isn’t used) regime spy on the area, which is a hotbed of rebellion. Zamora is a charming, sometimes cruel playboy and womanizer, but he’s deeply unhappy and basically decent. Recognizing the intelligence of Lina, his cook’s young daughter, he lends her Pigafetta’s account of Magellan’s expedition, excerpted throughout the novel, and promises to send her to school. But Lina, who blossoms into a great beauty as she approaches adolescence, runs away with the first man who pays her serious attention. Pregnant at 14, she is soon working as a bar-girl. In 1977, a troubled American actor, Vince Moody, meets Lina, now calling herself Jinx, at a sleazy nightclub where he’s hanging out to soak up local atmosphere. A besotted Vince brings Lina/Jinx along to the set of the Vietnam War film being shot by an acclaimed American director, whose wife is making her own film of the filming. Meanwhile, Paz Marlowe, a US journalist born and raised in the Philippines, comes home to do a story on the increasingly reclusive Zamora but snags an interview with the film’s director instead. Zamora and Vince will hold readers’ interest when they’re on stage, and the mysterious monkey people are alluring, but most of the time Hagedorn strains too obviously for her effects .
Ambitious but disjointed and unevenly written: the parts just don’t add up to a whole.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-88458-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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