McMurtry's down-home fictions have always been juiced up with side-orders of raunchy charm and beer-barrel comedy—but this time he tries, with middling results, to make an entire novel out of such enticing (yet ultimately wearying) trimmings. Narrator-hero "Cadillac Jack" McGriff is a onetime rodeo bulldogger who now travels the country, in his pearly Cadillac, as a super-duper dealer/scout—picking up antiques and other collectibles (e.g., a load of gem-entrusted cowboy boots), buying at garage sales, selling to the super-rich. His prime client: Texas tycoon Boog, now living in Washington D.C. with gorgeous wife Boss—who fights fire with fire when it comes to Boog's lust for cheap women. (She'll "fuck six famous Yankees for every little pot he stuck his dipstick in.") And so twice-divorced Cadillac Jack winds up visiting D.C., where he promptly falls for two contrasting residents: social-climbing boutique owner Cindy, a freewheeling insta-bedmate who drags Jack to cartoony/gross elite Washington shindigs; and weary, downbeat Jean Tooley, an almost-divorcee who has two adorable little daughters . . . and who shares Jack's love of old, pretty things. Aside from some vague rumors about the Smithsonian collections being sold, then, there's hardly a flicker of drama as the leisurely narrative pokes along: Jack bounces back and forth between his two ladies; he also lusts after Boog's wife Boss (who prefers her tiny live-in Jewish poet) and dawdles with "two fat wet girls on a rubber mattress in a fairly low-grade pussy parlor"; he gets car-phone calls from ex-wife Coffee (who "thought World War II had occurred in the nineteenth century"). And finally, to clear his head, he drives out west—gathering famous pairs of boots (so Cindy can exhibit them), acquiring a forlorn traveling companion (a bored wife). . . but returning to find that he still can't commit himself to one woman or the other. McMurtry does a dandy job with Jack's business doings here: his highway world of garage-sale finds, auction fever, and obsessive acquisition is captured in rich, economic detail. And the quieter comedy (those cute daughters, the hooker conversations, poor Coffee) often scores. But the supposed center of this novel, Jack's romantic quandary, is uninvolving throughout, thanks to the thin characterizations—while the broader D.C. farce clashes badly with the tough-guy sentimentality. An idle mix of charm, noise, and hoke, then: far too long (unlike Dan Jenkins' comparable, modest Baja Oklahoma), fitfully endearing, and especially disappointing after the textured comedy/drama control of Somebody Darling.
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 1982
ISBN: 0684853833
Page Count: 405
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1982
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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