Though the novel ultimately covers a lot of territory, this isn’t a return to the Oscar-winner’s epic sweep of Lonesome...
McMurtry delivers more laughs and a lot more sex than usual as he chronicles the transition from the waning days of the Old West gunfighters through the rise of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.
It’s hard to imagine how a novel beginning with a father’s suicide by hanging, leaving the narrator and her brother as orphans, should quickly turn into a comic romp. It does so through the eyes, voice and gallows humor of Marie Antoinette Courtright, known as Nellie, the latest in the prolific McMurtry’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of feisty frontier damsels. Few men can resist Nellie’s saucy charm, and fewer still are worthy of her, though she’s willing to settle for less whenever the frequent desire for copulation strikes her. And she’s not all that particular as to where it strikes, taking her sexual pleasure in a jail cell, a hayloft, whatever’s convenient. Almost every man who meets Nellie either courts her or proposes to her, thus giving McMurtry (The Colonel and Little Missie, 2005) plenty of chances to namedrop the likes of “Georgie” Custer, “Billy” Hickok and the irascible brothers Earp. Her allure also sets in motion the minimal plot, as she convinces a smalltown sheriff, one of her many fiancés, to hire her teenage brother, Jackson, as his deputy. When Jackson single-handedly guns down a gang of outlaws, the episode attracts plenty of notice to this frontier outpost, and Nellie’s account of her brother’s exploits gives her quick success as a writer (thus allowing McMurtry the opportunity for droll commentary on the author’s lot and the mixture of fact and fiction that popularly defines the Old West). It also brings her to the attention of Buffalo Bill Cody, whom she comes to adore above all others, but who is the one man who can resist her charms (not that he’s oblivious to them).
Though the novel ultimately covers a lot of territory, this isn’t a return to the Oscar-winner’s epic sweep of Lonesome Dove, but it’s an easy, breezy read.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-5078-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
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
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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