A first novel from Trinidadian-born James (the story collection Jumping Ship, 1992) that turns the coming-of-age of a young Caribbean woman into a disturbing fable—one that movingly evokes the loss of innocence in a lush tropical demi-paradise. James again displays his lyrical gifts in a story that makes the island setting as palpable a presence as his protagonist, young Uxann. Uxann, innocent and dutiful, lives with her father, Seyeh, on a small farm outside the local village. Her mother went off with another man, and now Seyeh carefully protects Uxann from worldly influence. Uxann, a diligent and accomplished student at the local convent, delights in studying, taking care of the farm animals, and keeping house for her beloved father. But it is inevitable—her classmates are already falling in love, getting pregnant, and having to drop-out—that Uxann's innocence cannot endure. In a series of sometimes less-than-credible twists and turns of plot, Uxann painfully and then tragically is expelled from Eden into a horrifying world where old secrets are revealed and new disasters wreak havoc. Her father arranges for her school-friend Keah to help with the housework to earn money against a debt her family owes; Uxann's initial reservations are overcome by her pleasure in having company in the house. But sexually experienced Keah, the designated serpent in the story, soon seduces Uxann's father; Uxann finds out, and in despair gets drunk, which leads to her being unknowingly— and unconvincingly—impregnated by her equally drunk father. A son is born, and Uxann, noting the resemblance to her father, is driven to madness and murder. ``The natural order,'' the routine of the farm, will be her only comfort. A stunning tragedy of carefully calibrated horror and pulsating sensuality that is more a tropical murder of the innocents that a conventional rites-of-passage novel.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42409-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
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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