Poet Hoffman's fictional debut: a doomed romance, set in the New York art and literary worlds, whose players are inspired and silly, courageous and maudlin by turns. Joy is a poet who can count among her blessings a growing professional reputation, a prestigious teaching job, a supportive philosophy-professor husband, a beautiful New York apartment and a perfect set of children. Yet she has never known happiness—not, that is, until the failed seduction of her husband's boss propels her into a vanity-soothing affair with famous artist Carl Vaggio. Sex with Vaggio, a self-satisfied eccentric with a host of female admirers and several missing front teeth, provides the necessary sadomasochistic buzz to make Joy come alive; and compared to the affair, the rest of her life—the gratifying career, the beautiful children, the marriage to what she suspects is her ``womanly'' husband—doesn't count for much. A sexually abusive grandfather, ambitious and unhappy mother, and passive father are trotted out as reasons why Joy becomes obsessed with such an utterly self-centered lover, but her own lust for drama plays a major role as well. As Joy's parents divorce, her best friend (another of Carl's lovers) dies of cancer, and her mother begins to lose her mind, Joy retreats to London to write a book about them all—then claims that her career is ruined when one player in the roman Ö clef threatens to sue on publication. Joy consoles herself by abandoning her teaching, divorcing her husband, and ignoring her children for the sake of Vaggio, who absent-mindedly continues to reject her—until she wakes up at last to find herself middle-aged but finally empty of passion for the artist (now a tiny old man) who took everything and gave her nothing. A sad first novel whose heroine swings trapeze-like between braggadocio and despair—steeped in sharp, sexy, ethereal, sometimes even funny prose.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-79518-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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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