A comical, believable story of how a couple can unravel simply by wanting to protect each other.
Donato’s novel tells a familiar tale of a marriage’s wear and tear, but it’s packed with surprising twists.
Most marriages reach a tepid phase as the nest empties, and Kate McAllister’s is no exception. Her husband, Michael, a reliable provider and dependable husband, has stood beside her as their two children grew from infancy to early adulthood. Now, as their home seems emptier, Michael seems less loving, something that Kate accepts as a passing phase in their new stage of life. That is, until Michael murmurs another woman’s name in his sleep. The name Marilyn, a name Kate cannot recall hearing from Michael in any other context, suddenly appears everywhere. Kate finds her business card—with an incriminating handwritten message scrawled across it—tucked into Michael’s pant pocket. Kate soon discovers that Marilyn Campbell is, in fact, an ambitious and beautiful woman determined to get what she wants. Kate grows increasingly suspicious about her husband. When the beautiful Marilyn shows up at Kate’s office unexpectedly, bearing a tightly sealed envelope for Michael, Kate’s paranoia overwhelms her, and she opens it. What she discovers confirms her worst suspicions, and it triggers a quest for truth that has Kate digging into every private corner of Michael’s life. As Thanksgiving approaches, bringing with it Kate’s traditional dinner for more than 20 people, the tension escalates, and her marriage seems harder and harder to salvage. Fast-paced and highly readable, Kate’s story is one that is not only sympathetic, but packed with its own surprises as well. How well does anyone know his or her spouse? How does one walk a line between sharing hard secrets and not wanting to disappoint the other person? All of this is explored as the characters maneuver life as best they can, creating further misunderstandings as they try to make their way back to each other.
A comical, believable story of how a couple can unravel simply by wanting to protect each other.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615639734
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Devon Grove Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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