It's certainly possible to write a hilarious novel about a bad comic, but Warner never breaks through the smug sensibility...
The sardonic tale of a hapless comic who rockets to fame with an idiotic gimmick only to find his life in worse turmoil—especially after emptying a gun into a guy on the street, for reasons left unexplained until the end.
Warner, a writer-editor associated with McSweeney's, makes his fiction debut with a novel about a character referred to only as the funny man—not the Funny Man, but the lower-case kind. The funny man's shtick is to deliver impressions and one-liners with his fist shoved deep into his mouth. His ticket to greater fame is a movie so awful—a bunch of hand-in-throat outtakes—that audiences mistake it for something brilliant. The funny man loves all the money and celebrity and limo sex, but it doesn't make him any less pathetic. His wife leaves him when a publicity-seeking actress claims she had sex with him during filming, comes back after he falsely fesses up and then leaves him again when he insists on the truth. His lawyer's genius strategy to plead him not guilty by reason of celebrity is a non-starter. And then there's the obligatory blow to the crotch the funny man suffers, in a batting cage. Redemption comes, sort of, in the form of the one-time tennis star he has been smitten with since detecting she was beaming him private messages in her TV ads. Much of the book seems beamed from the past as well. Warner's cultural commentary is passé when not obvious, and in going after a George Saunders–type absurdism, he isn't especially funny or clever (the protagonist's fondness for Kick in the A$$, a reality show he invents on which volunteers get booted in the rear for money, is indistinguishable from Warner's). Warner also should note that no comic would use "You dirty rat," the most famous line James Cagney never actually uttered, in a Bogie impersonation.
It's certainly possible to write a hilarious novel about a bad comic, but Warner never breaks through the smug sensibility of his debut to transcend his subject.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56947-973-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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