This tale of a flawed man in a gritty setting manages to be both intense and beautiful.
Set in Minneapolis during the Great Depression, McInerny’s novel tells the story of Horton Moon, whose love of drink and women leads to his downfall.
Moon’s life is something short of perfect. He has a job, but it doesn’t pay nearly enough; with four kids and a fifth on the way, he’s struggling. He loves his wife, Annie, and most of the time they get along, but she doesn’t like how much time he spends drinking at the neighborhood bar. Then Moon meets and falls in love with Caroline, a young woman freshly arrived from the prairie. Though he never stops loving Annie, he takes up with Caroline; it isn’t long before Annie learns of the affair. Things are bleak, and when Moon loses his job, they grow bleaker. That’s when he decides to take his friend Peterson up on his offer to partner together for a robbery. It seems to go well, and Moon is relieved to be suddenly flush with money—until he learns that the guys they stole from want him dead. For a while, Moon goes underground, living among the hard-luck guys at the poor end of town before leaving the city, but for him, Minneapolis is home. So, he comes home to face his fate. With the exception of a short prologue and epilogue, Moon draws readers in while narrating in the present tense, and McInerny’s simple, spare style captures the feel of 1930s Minnesota. In describing a key character, Moon says, “There’s a history between Uncle Jack Morrison and myself that I maybe need to spell out right here. I don’t like Jack. And he doesn’t like me.” The short prologue introduces an element of mystery that will keep readers guessing until almost the very end of the novel. As the prologue states, the real story is that of Moon and how he changed; though the novel is essentially a character study, it avoids the dull, self-indulgent style that can sometimes weigh down similar novels. McInerny balances Moon’s moments of introspection with bursts of action that keep the pace quick and the pages turning.
This tale of a flawed man in a gritty setting manages to be both intense and beautiful.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615650838
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Tanglefinger Books
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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