Smith's last two novels (The Blue Hour, 1989, and The Discovery of Light, 1992) presented fashionable men who had to deal with their wives' abrupt departure or death; this time, it's a woman whose life is turned inside out by her husband's sordid killing. Hours before he was to have met his wife, Jill Bowman, for a farewell dinner before his flight to a London conference, psychiatrist Peter Freytag bleeds to death, his throat slit in a transient hotel room in a carefully unnamed city that's got to be New York. The obvious questions—who killed him and why?—are swiftly subordinated to more pressing questions of survival and recovery for Jill, a history professor who finds herself relentlessly rehashing her own history with this man suddenly grown a stranger. Struggling to overcome her belief that Peter's just playing a joke, that he'll come back any minute, she rouses herself to continue her painful round of visits to her daughter Carrie, a retarded teenager from a previous marriage whom Peter never wanted to deal with. And Jill finds herself swept back to her first brush with violence as a child—when a neighbor's death struck her hysterically mute for four months; her abortive affair with a guitar-repairer; her unconsummated desire for one of her students. As you'd expect from Smith, every wish and memory is sexualized, but sadly, hopelessly, as if Peter's death marked a good-bye to all that—even though Jill wonders repeatedly if David Resnick, the married police detective investigating the case, is looking at her the same way she's looking at him. Veterans of Smith's earlier novels will have decided very early on that the case isn't likely ever to be closed, and the final revelations that allow Jill to get on with her life, knowing that ``this was the beginning not of wisdom but of age,'' come almost as an anticlimax. Less modish, more tremulous, and more deeply felt than Smith's earlier enigmas.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-86046-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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
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