A debut to be enjoyed by idealists everywhere, and one bound to get Austin locals gossiping.
Acid-sweet tale of life, love and politics in slackerville.
Texas Monthly writer Olsson’s wry first novel is set in a lightly fictionalized Austin, Texas, a town disoriented by the tech boom. Centered on the tight-knit political scene (it reads like a post-script to Billy Brammer’s The Gay Place), Olsson’s characters cross paths as they struggle fitfully toward action through a haze of heat, alcohol and compromised ideals. Nick Lasseter, a reporter for the no-longer-independent Weekly, is sunk in a torpor exacerbated by the paper’s new “serve the consumer” attitude and his ex-girlfriend’s engagement. His uncle, Bones Lasseter, is an alcoholic wreck of a wily lobbyist who misses the ’70s, when cheap rent, drugs and ideals were easily attainable. Distracted by her affair with the dimwitted but handsome gubernatorial candidate, Republican freshman legislator Beverly Flintic unwittingly sponsors a bill written by a national land developer and innocently breaks with the party line. An ambitious black woman, Andrea Carter is just putting in her time among the white liberals at the daily paper, but finds herself drawn to Nick’s world of drinking, music and eccentricity when they go on a few dates. (Latinos, by the way, are oddly absent from Waterloo.) Andrea is haunted by her father’s Waterloo legacy as a desegregationist and employee of congressman William Sabert, whose death opens the novel. Mourned as one of the last great liberals, Sabert is really a moderate who drifted into greatness. Indeed, the importance and danger of drift, mess, moderation and nostalgia is Olsson’s true subject—and a strength and weakness of the novel. Olsson’s narrative lines touch, but do not cohere. Important things happen, but the action seems deliberately muted, belated, offstage. Ultimately, however, Olsson’s dry irony, nuanced observations and enjoyably moody atmosphere build into a sophisticated portrait of her hometown.
A debut to be enjoyed by idealists everywhere, and one bound to get Austin locals gossiping.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-28626-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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