Unglamorous and sad, but compelling.
A first novel explores two friendships in two centuries in the Pacific Northwest.
Raymond’s impressive debut lays out stories linked by shared ground near Portland, Oregon. Callow Cookie Figowitz, cook for a trapping party in the early 19th century, finds a naked stowaway on the fringe of his campsite and, despite the dwindling food supplies, feeds and hides the handsome Henry, an energetic young character who has already sailed the globe and is now hiding from the pack of Russians who murdered his Indian friends nearby. Their ensuing deepening friendship will lead the young men into a somewhat daffy economic venture, the extraction and sale of castoreum, a beaver musk highly prized in China. The castoreum sells, but Cookie is clapped in a Cantonese prison for decades. A hundred and fifty years later, teenagers Tina Plank and Trixie Volterra stalk the same acres, now a slightly bedraggled hippie refuge, in the 1980s. Trixie, exiled from LA after brushes with the law, is living with a family friend. Tina’s mother’s research project in Santa Cruz has fallen victim to Reaganomics, so she’s come to Oregon to regroup, bringing her smart but sullen daughter, who slowly bonds with the more flamboyant Trixie. The hippie ethic leaves the sloppily educated girls to their own devices, in this case the evolution of a goofy but imaginative screenplay about a Philadelphia physician who invents the frontal lobotomy. In the midst of the surprisingly successful beginnings of the film project, Neil Rust, who owns the ragtag farm, uncovers a pair of skeletons on ground that used to be a bog. Despite forensic evidence that the bones belong to a European and an Asian, the local Indians claim ownership and burial rights. The stalemate over the bones becomes a big news story that will eventually trample the film venture and lead to a tragedy as sad as that of Cookie’s end in that same bog.
Unglamorous and sad, but compelling.Pub Date: May 14, 2004
ISBN: 1-58234-448-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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