Strong, wide-ranging tales that more than fulfill the promise of the author’s first book.
In the year 2000, as the millennium shifts, the characters in these 11 short stories shift their own perceptions by connecting with others.
Behar (Turn the Page, 2015, etc.) explains in an author’s note that he first drafted these tales in 1998 and 2002; as a result, a millennial preoccupation with change is at the heart of this well-observed collection. In the opening story, “Death Threats,” a struggling rock band finds itself making a devil’s bargain with Jennifer Newman, the daughter of a hated radio station owner. They’d hoped to manipulate her father by getting her to sing with them; soon, as the band’s lead singer, she brings them new success, but the narrator misses their old freedom, which is gone like Jennifer’s former pudginess: “they swear 2000 is the year we make it big…[but] when I look at Jennifer’s washboard stomach, all I can think about is what we’ve lost.” As this example shows, change can be transformative but also uncomfortable—or even strange, as in the story “Seepage.” In it, a suburban couple’s sweaty sensuality, symbolized by a fuel oil leak, at first disgusts their straight-laced neighbors, only to later become a welcome, if unwholesome, seduction. Other stories, told from first- and third-person perspectives, explore a range of viewpoints, including that of a young boy puzzled by his Chinese friend’s grandmother and her superstitions; those of a 30-ish yuppie couple hoping to adopt a Russian boy; and that of a young woman going fishing with her boyfriend. In all these situations, Behar ably employs a flexible, natural voice to trace his characters’ realizations. For example, in the final story, a makeup artist for a flamboyant women’s wrestling team describes an unlikely but dramatic romance between a fan and a wrestler: “I held out for a guy who would look at me the way Red had looked at Mount Fuji. It took fifteen years for that guy to come along. It was worth the wait.”
Strong, wide-ranging tales that more than fulfill the promise of the author’s first book.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5393-3015-8
Page Count: 212
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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