After the ambitious dark-comedy of Somebody's Darling and the satiric sprawl of Cadillac Jack, McMurtry returns here to the affectionate, life-sized, gently biting portraiture of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show. Harmony is a veteran Las Vegas showgirl, toplessly approaching age 39, long-separated from shrimpy husband Ross, recently involved with crass Denny. . . who has just stolen her long-awaited $1300 insurance check. ("In the love area she didn't have such great brakes. . . . The sadness of men, once it got into their eyes, affected her a lot, she sort of couldn't bear it and would usually try and make it go away if the circumstances permitted her to. . . .") But Harmony's biggest problem, whether she fully knows it or not, is her cold-hearted teenage daughter Pepper—who's even more beautiful than Harmony, who loathes Harmony's clothes ("Every single blouse you've got is tacky"), who drips scorn on her optimistic, emotional, sentimental mother. And the novel's small arc of action is the inevitable see-sawing of these two lives—Pepper going up, Harmony on the way down. For dance-student Pepper, there's an audition at the casino where Harmony works, impressing even nasty boss Bonventre ("if you worked for him your body was his to condemn"); there's also the kinky courtship of super-rich, 45-ish Mel—a proud voyeur who pays grand sums to photograph Pepper in antique lingerie and proposes marriage. For Harmony, on the other hand, there's best-friend Jessie's ankle-shattering fall during a show ("'For Christ's sake, she only fell six or eight feet, will you stop making it into an Ann-Margret situation?' Bonventre said, he sort of looked bored"); there's a grim date with ex-Marine Dave, a mercenary-magazine aficionado who shares his beloved K rations, even opening three different kinds ("For him it was a big deal, sort of like taking her to a fancy restaurant or something"); and, predictably, there's the numbing shock of getting fired from the casino—though all these traumas will push Harmony into a gallant stab at reconciliation with Ross, now bald and more potato-faced than ever. (But "he still had the soft little Kansas voice, plus best of all Ross still had the sweet eyes.") True, McMurtry's folksy narration occasionally gets a bit mannered—with flaky digressions, the paragraph-long sentence runons, the recurrent "sort of." And, however endearing, Harmony never quite breaks out of the familiar dumb/sweet/gallant mold. But Pepper is a formidably unsentimental creation, the supporting cast is lovably eccentric (Harmony's housemates include goats, peacocks, and garage-sale-maven Myrtle)—and, even if not every deep, this is an ingratiating closeup of wounded-yet-cheerful souls, steadily alive with modest insights and low-key humor.
Pub Date: Sept. 6, 1983
ISBN: 0684853841
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1983
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.
Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952
ISBN: 0142004235
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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