Don’t believe the critical canard that the Wild West tale is dead—this novel proves again that it ain’t even seriously...
A compelling image of the legendary outlaw’s flawed, fascinating character gradually takes shape in this latest from veteran historical novelist Vernon (Creative Writing/Binghamton Univ.; The Last Canyon, 2001, etc.).
Beginning with a description of the famous “tintype” illustration of teenaged William Bonney (who sometimes toted his hated stepfather’s surname: Antrim), Vernon zeroes in on several key years and episodes in Billy the Kid’s life. We see him first in 1881, when likewise-legendary Sheriff Pat Garrett has captured and jailed the Kid and his fellow mercenaries, who had fought during the New Mexico territory’s notorious Lincoln County War on the side of honorable English landowner John Tunstall against Irish-American cattle barons led by murderous rancher James Dolan. It sounds a mite complicated—and is, for some pages, as the narrative whipsaws backward and forward. The well-meaning Tunstall’s story unfolds in letters to his parents and financial backers; Billy’s quick conversion to crime and violence provides an escape from inhibiting memories of his unhappy boyhood and his beloved mother’s early death; then Billy’s final days take center stage. Vernon’s mastery of period detail and cowboy culture is rich and convincing; for example, we learn that the word “rustler” is a corruption of “wrestler.” But the time shifts create confusion as well as propulsive narrative energy, and it’s a chore sorting out imperfectly differentiated sidekicks, gunslingers and passing strangers. Fortunately, the novel’s shapely arc efficiently establishes Billy’s exigent and defensive morality: “Forget good, I’m after justice…Alls I ever did was shoot a few people.” And there’s real pathos in the working out of his destiny, perfectly encapsulated in the hired gun’s foreknowledge that “his [own] bullet would follow him all his life, taking every turn he took.”
Don’t believe the critical canard that the Wild West tale is dead—this novel proves again that it ain’t even seriously wounded.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-547-07423-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
Touching and inspirational.
A scarf ties together the stories of two women as they struggle with personal journeys 100 years apart in Meissner’s historical novel (The Girl in the Glass, 2012, etc.).
In 1911, Clara Wood witnesses the traumatic death of the man she loves in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and chooses to bury her grief and guilt while ministering to sick immigrants on Ellis Island. The hospital’s remote and insulated from the rest of New York City, and she refuses travel to the mainland, even on her days off. Then an emigrant Welshman wrapped in his deceased wife’s distinctive marigold scarf arrives, and Clara finds herself reaching beyond her normal duties to help the quarantined man. The truths she uncovers about his wife trigger reflections about ethical decisions and compel her to examine her own convictions about life and a person’s capacity to love, as a colleague tries to help her. Gently interwoven into Clara’s tale is the story of widow Taryn Michaels, whose life 100 years later in some ways parallels Clara’s. Taryn works in a tony fabric shop, raises her daughter in the apartment above and does her best to avoid the overwhelming emotions she’s felt since she stood across the street from the World Trade Center and witnessed the destruction as the first tower crumbled. A recently discovered photo from that day is published in a national magazine and now, 10 years after 9/11, Taryn is forced to relive the events and face the guilt she’s harbored because she acceded to a customer’s request and stopped by a hotel to pick up a marigold scarf, an action that delayed Taryn from joining her husband at Windows on the World for a celebration she’d planned. Meissner is a practiced writer whose two main characters cope with universal themes that many people deal with: loss, survivor’s guilt, and permitting oneself to move on and achieve happiness again. Although their stories are unbalanced—Clara’s account dominates the narrative—the author creates two sympathetic, relatable characters that readers will applaud.
Touching and inspirational.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-451-41991-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: New American Library
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An uneven mix of Dracula and theater lore but a thoughtful exploration of the tangled nature of desire and commitment.
Better known as the author of Dracula, Bram Stoker in his day job as general manager of London’s Lyceum Theatre is the focus of Irish writer O’Connor’s atmospheric new novel.
Mind you, there are plenty of nods to his famous horror story, from a ghost in the theater’s attic named Mina to a scene-painter named Jonathan Harker, plus the fact that the dreaded vampire bears a more than passing resemblance to Stoker’s mercurial boss, legendary actor Henry Irving. Harker turns out to be a woman, a twist that suits the seething homoerotic currents between Stoker and Irving, who can also be found entwined in the naked arms of co-star Ellen Terry. Terry’s voice as recorded in 1906—funny, bitchy, extremely shrewd about her acting partner’s gifts and limitations—offers a welcome counterpoint to the sometimes overly dense third-person narrative of Stoker’s tenure at the Lyceum and on tour in the late 1870s and '80s, grappling with Irving’s neuroses while striving to snatch some time for his own writing. This is a tougher, colder work than Ghost Light (2011), O’Connor’s previous fictional excursion into theatrical lives, and that novel’s portrait of actor Molly Allgood’s love affair with playwright John Synge was gentler than this one of Stoker’s thorny relationship with Irving, a toxic blend of need, rage, resentment, and profound love. Still, the men’s bond is as moving and more unsettling, proof that, as Stoker later tells Harker, “Love is not a matter of who puts what where but of wanting only goodness and respectful kindliness for the loved one.” Irving seems less deserving of such kindness than Stoker’s assertive wife, Flo, who makes sure he gets copyright protection for the vampire story his boss cruelly dismisses as “filth and tedious rubbish from first to last.” Flo’s tender letter to Terry after Stoker’s death closes the novel, with another affirmation that “There are many kinds of love. I know that. He did, too.”
An uneven mix of Dracula and theater lore but a thoughtful exploration of the tangled nature of desire and commitment.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-60945-593-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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