A debut collection of 14 stories that highlights the author's personaland highly effectiveuse of magical realism. The title story, in which Ione discovers a door in her apartment she's never noticed before and finds it leads to another world, is an apt metaphor for Heuler's prevalent theme of the magical. The best here feature a seamless blend of the mundane and the fantastic, as ordinary characters undergo extraordinary experiences. In ``Like a Piston, Like a Flame,'' Vera, a ballerina extraordinaire, loses a leg; after months of grueling practice with a wooden replacement, and with the assistance of her circus- performer husband, she puts on the performance of her life. ``The Hole Story'' pokes fun at people who think hiding garbage in dumps makes it disappear: When George Wilcox falls into the hole that's appeared in the center of town and doesn't come out, his wife jumps in after him; inside, they find where the world's refuse is storedand rediscover each other in the process. Cleverness is only one of Heuler's tools for exploring her subjects; astute observation on themes as complex as friendship is another. In ``The Revolt of Everyday Things,'' Fran Rood and so-called best friend Becky are friends only ``because each measured herself quite victoriously against the other.'' And daunting social issues are not taboo``The Light at the End'' goes beneath the ``should one give homeless people money'' question to explore the points of view of all parties involved: giver, recipient, and bystander. When Heuler misses the mark (rarely), it's not by much. Although the cryptic ``Overpowering Joy'' gets lost in itself, ``Notes From the Attic,'' a mystical play on a theme with a gritty core, raises serious feminist concerns. Symbolism that's occasionally too obscure, but Heuler can take up issues and at the same time show the inventive powers behind the door of her imagination.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8262-1041-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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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