A slender, fast-paced, fever-dreamed excursion that, despite a lack of plot, becomes undeniably addictive.
A rollicking, entertaining adventure on the open road starring two ferocious youths fueled by booze, pot, and canned spaghetti.
Screenwriter and author LaPoma (Developing Minds: An American Ghost Story, 2015) combines the restlessness of youth with the lure of drugs and dreams in his latest novel about young men desperate to escape the confines of their stagnant lives. This character-driven novel opens not with fanfare or history, but with action and movement. Danny boards his friend Ian’s Toyota Camry for what they hope to be a life-changing cross-country road trip, leaving Buffalo for the West. Having recently graduated college, both rough-and-tumble, music-loving men hit the road without a game plan or a goal or even much money, just their desire to start a band and to “write songs and play them on the streets of the Haight.” The novel is frenetically narrated by Danny, a hyperactive, easily agitated 22-year-old with a history of psychological issues, paranoia, and antagonistic internal voices—not to mention the private pain of his chronic anal fissures, which plays out in a series of panicked, agony-wracked bathroom sequences. They stop in Illinois to visit mutual friend Ricky, and Danny smokes the kind of weed he hopes will stave off his anxiety, knowing that “there was no place I could hide if shit turned bad.” Thankfully, in the glaring absence of real plot points, LaPoma adds back story to flesh out the origins of Danny and Ian’s friendship—Danny’s love for a girl named Delilah and their mutual affinity for music. A stop in Iowa leaves room for more music and marijuana. As they arrive in Colorado amid a haze of parties and drugs, the men’s bickering escalates and becomes more personal. They finally arrive in California, where the party continues from San Francisco down to Los Angeles, and the travelers mingle with “hip sexy people everywhere, all groomed and painted and waxed to perfection.” LaPoma, not seeming to know what to do with his perpetually blitzed, spun-out characters, leaves them in Vegas, where they “smoke…a shitload of pot,” have a quick epiphany, decide to stop running, and head home to reboot their lives.
A slender, fast-paced, fever-dreamed excursion that, despite a lack of plot, becomes undeniably addictive.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9988403-2-1
Page Count: 133
Publisher: Almendro Arts
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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