A funny, gossipy look at a slice of the South through the eyes of an indelible character.
In this Southern comedy of manners, Clark (Milking the Moon: A Southerner’s Story of Life on this Planet, 2014) explores the world of charismatic, eccentric Assistant Headmaster Norman Laney as he attempts to reshape the cloistered world of high-society Alabama from within.
A hugely overweight arts aficionado with a blue-collar background, Laney is an anomaly in the upper-crust community of 1980s Mountain Brook, an all-white suburb of Birmingham, insulated from the turmoil of the post–civil rights era by wealth and tradition. Laney’s mission at the private Brook-Haven School is to infuse some of the outside world back into Mountain Brook by launching the children of the elite into the Ivy League, or at least making them familiar with the work of Jackson Pollock. Though he’s adored by his students and the country-club set alike, Laney faces one major foe: Tommy Turbyfill, the headmaster, who's intent on pushing him out of the school for a mysterious violation. Clark uses her considerable skill to enliven Laney’s attempts to hold on to his position while simultaneously navigating the minefields of dinner parties, gallery openings, and parent-teacher conferences. Laney is based on Clark’s own high school headmaster, and her blow-by-blow descriptions of the mechanics of the school, and of Mountain Brook in general, sometimes make the book read like a meandering cocktail-party story. But when she gets the pacing right, it becomes an insider's guide to the drama of the debutante set and a perceptive look at the growing pains of a community attempting to change its deeply entrenched ways.
A funny, gossipy look at a slice of the South through the eyes of an indelible character.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61117-538-7
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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