The perils of money—both too much and too little—are well detailed in this debut novel about a couple who live in an ancient English country house and try to avoid financial ruin by selling a collection of souvenir mugs to a rich American. Little Waitling Hall, parts of which were built in the 1400s, is in danger of collapsing into the muddy moat that surrounds it. The occupants, Fliss and Ivor Harley-Wright, do their best to maintain the place, with no help from Ivor’s eccentric mother, Martita, but by 1987, despite their best efforts’sheep farming, Fliss’s handmade pottery, and dried flowers” they—re heavily in debt. Their only hope is to sell the mugs collected by Ivor’s father, some dating from the 17th century, to American billionaire Constantine Ziminovski. Mr. Z sends Tom Klaus, an ambitious and recently divorced lawyer who dreams of becoming super-rich, to finalize the negotiation. Fliss and Ivor do their best to make a good impression when Klaus arrives to inspect the collection. Fliss borrows bed linen, they spend overdraft money to purchase oil for the old furnace and try to spruce up the house. But the visit doesn’t go well: Martita hints at legal conditions that would affect the sale, the furnace stops working, and Fliss has to deal with a drunk and amorous Klaus. Against Klaus’s advice, Mr. Z. buys the mugs, pays half in advance, and invites Fliss to visit New York to get the rest of the money. Meanwhile, though, Mr.Z. and Klaus are arrested for fraud, and the check bounces. Fliss and Ivor survive as new projects prove more fruitful, and Fliss realizes, as the early “90s recession affects once rich friends, that “there’s always something in life to keep your mind churning in the darkest of the night, if you let it.” An unpretentious comedy of manners with an agreeably lower-case lesson about life.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-20887-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
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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