Familiar themes for a gay novel, but Weir conveys them inventively and effectively.
A gay scholar meditates on a lifetime of losses and humiliations both before and during the age of AIDS.
This second novel by Weir (The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, not reviewed) is set during a single day in 2000: Tom, a 40-something community-college English teacher and novelist living in New York, is roped into joining his childhood friend Richie as he meets an Internet acquaintance for a date. This small event provokes a cascade of memories for Tom, most of them deeply melancholic: the sad, slow death of his friend Zack as he succumbed to AIDS, the insults and worse from his classmates and teachers in high school who publicly berated him for being (or at least seeming) gay, his complicated emotional and sexual relationship with his friend Ava. Many of Tom’s remembrances are of being a gay man in the ’80s, which inevitably makes this novel at least partly an AIDS elegy—as Weir writes, “we didn’t have much of a context except illness and death.” But despite its title, and despite the fact that Tom is the contemplative and moody sort, this book is never burdened by a somber, self-pitying tone. If anything, Tom’s main torment—the crush he has on Justin, a young, handsome and talented student—brings energy and a feeling of optimism to the story. Weir’s finest achievement is the way he connects disparate events to create a sort of emotional synthesis—as when a trip to Herman Melville’s grave with Justin segues into Zack’s final days, and a stop at Richie’s apartment gives way to a memory of a high-school beating. Individually, they’re just scraps of events; woven together, they become revelatory passages on the wounds each of the characters bear, and on what gives them the strength to move their lives forward.
Familiar themes for a gay novel, but Weir conveys them inventively and effectively.Pub Date: March 27, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03484-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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