Peerless conductor Louis Passau, accused on the eve of his 90th birthday of having been a Nazi spy, is to be debriefed by a covey of British and American agents—until two breathless attempts on his life leave him in the maverick hands of Big Herbie Kruger (the paperback The Quiet Dogs, etc.), pulled out from retirement to serve as his father confessor. Once he gets going, Passau seems to be confessing to the entire 20th century. As Louis Packenstky back in Bavaria, he's dragged off to America by his shoemaker father; then, suddenly discovering his musical vocation as Louis Packensteiner in New York, he defrauds his father and takes off for Prohibition Chicago, resurfacing with his friend and protector Charlie Giarre as Louis Packy—before selling out both Charlie and his smitten sister Sophie by arranging a liquor hijacking and going underground again. As Louis Passau, he wastes no time in marrying Hollywood money (a dope-addicted star) and clawing his way to a top conducting post (first poisoning the current maestro, whose absence gives him his debut). And this is all before he even gets pressured into any of his long-term spying jobs—for the Nazis, for the CIA, for the KGB (the last two involving a satisfying, though incredible, conspiracy lasting for years). As Passau's story winds down, it begins to interlock uncomfortably with Herbie's betrayal by his old flame Ursula Zunder, who sold out their joint operation to the KGB; and Gardner makes much of the increasingly twisted relations between the confessor and his interlocutor, eventually ensnaring Herbie's new love Pucky Curtiss, who's helping him keep Passau one step ahead of all those spies and mobsters who'd like him dead—though not, finally, to the climactic effect he presumably intends. Disappointing as a generational spy epic to set alongside Gardner's nonpareil Secret Generations trilogy (though a promised sequel may develop some patterns hastily dropped here), this works best as a sweepingly enjoyable soap opera of ambitious scheming, sexual conquest, and the inevitable payback.
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1993
ISBN: 1-883402-24-7
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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