In a reprise of old themes, haunts, and ideas, metafiction master Barth (The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, 1991) returns to himself and his native Chesapeake Bay in this fictional memoir of a middle-aged writer embarked on an autumnal cruise. The story is told in the Barthian way, within a frame of another story — in this case, the voyage of the writer's sloop, US, south into the "Chesapeake Triangle" on the Columbus Day weekend of October 1992. And the chosen form in which the author revisits his past and his vocation, writing, is no less structured — an opera in three acts with an overture to set the scene, arias for explication, and a concluding "episong." The author/Barth is accompanied by his beloved second wife, his "Reality Principle," as he sets sail on the fine Saturday afternoon, but as the cruise continues, the writer accidentally loses his beloved pen, "Pumblechook," bought years ago in Charles Dickens's birthplace. Then the weather deteriorates, moods darken, and the US runs aground in an unfamiliar marsh. Seeking help, Barth comes across his twin sister, Jill; his lost pen; and his "counterself," invented guide, and childhood friend, Jerry Schreiber, aka Jay Wordsworth Scribner, who's there to "goose things along and frame and distance the whole show." Virtual reality takes over as the writer, claiming not to be writing an autobiography, but "a kind of ship's log of the Inside Passage," revisits his childhood in Cambridge, Maryland; his first marriage; his college teaching; his writing successes, beginning with The Floating Opera; and his encounter with the woman who became his second wife. What's fiction and perhaps what's not is as tangled as the marsh grasses of Barth's native Dorchester County — and that's part of the fun, but the heavily schematic form, as well as the frequent literary one-upmanship, is more threatening to the venture than any fall storm. Very vintage Barth, and disappointingly so, despite the occasional reminders of a talent once new and stunningly inventive.
Pub Date: May 4, 1994
ISBN: 0316082589
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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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