In a style as unadorned as the characters he creates, Keller builds suspense slowly but inexorably—not so much about the...
The death of a fisherman off the wintry coast of Maine sparks a deadly feud in this debut novel.
In a remote area near the Bay of Fundy, Nicolas Graves and his partner, Osmond Randolph, have a fight over the future of their lobstering business. When Nicolas falls overboard, Osmond turns his boat around and leaves him to drown. Osmond, a former minister, has no qualms about presiding at Nicolas’ empty-coffin funeral and then immediately setting traps on his old partner’s hunting ground. Without a thought for the consequences, Nicolas’ younger son, known as Jonah, cuts the traplines to warn Osmond off the family territory and costs his father’s old partner thousands in lost stock and equipment. Osmond, desperate to support his three grandchildren, wants to partner with a slick salesman from Boston who covets the lobsters stored in the saltwater pound Nicolas built. But Jonah and his older brother Bill don’t want to sell out to big corporations, as so many of the other local fishermen have had to do. To their shock, they discover that their father left no will and that Osmond is the sole owner of the business. A grisly reminder of their father’s death makes Jonah and Bill even more suspicious of Osmond. Woman trouble, rivalry between the brothers and a trapping war up the ante even more in a tale that vividly portrays a bleak land, a cruel sea, the unexpected beauty of the blueberry barrens and a dark side of Downeast Maine that tourist brochures rarely show.
In a style as unadorned as the characters he creates, Keller builds suspense slowly but inexorably—not so much about the victim’s death as about what will happen when his fiercely independent sons find out how he died.Pub Date: June 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4405-8022-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Tyrus Books
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
