The message isn't lost on the reader, but it's shrouded in oppressively plangent (though often quite beautiful) prose so...
A complex history of secrecy and grief is gradually revealed in this painstakingly layered, deliberately muted first novel, from the author of Where She Went (stories: 1998).
At the outset it seems to be the story of narrator Ellen Rock's unspoken love for her older cousin Randall Jewell, a charming, intellectually curious boy who had shared his personal secrets with her—and perished during WWII on Iwo Jima, bequeathing to Ellen his diary and an illustrated volume describing the eponymous Japanese gardens (the subject of petitions that their pristine beauty be spared by Allied bombers). But the novel wanders, as Ellen searches both her own past and the histories of other people whose experiences impinge on or influence her own. Her older sister Rita dies young, after marrying a traumatized war veteran; and Ellen's own husband Henry, who breaks down and enters a V.A. hospital, fades from her life almost as quickly as he had (accidentally, as it happens) entered it. Her uncle Sterling (Randall's father) importunes Ellen to "Tell me about . . . my son," all but paralyzed by a guilty secret that mocks a life of outward rectitude. And Randall's legacy wounds Ellen as severely as do her own losses: She discovers not only that during the Civil War the Jewells' stately home had been a haven for runaway slaves, but that it had also been the site of horrendous injustices, including an embittered freeman's defiant act of vengeance. The novel's separate parts don't quite cohere formally, but the nature of their interconnection is suggested by this telling phrase from Randall's book: "Tucked within the gardens of Kyoto is a shrine to unborn children, to lost children, to children too soon dead."
The message isn't lost on the reader, but it's shrouded in oppressively plangent (though often quite beautiful) prose so concentrated on mourning for this story's numerous dead and gone that it disallows any contrary experience or emotion, or even a breath of air. Not negligible by any means, but awfully bleak and monotonous.Pub Date: April 2, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-86948-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
