It’s good to have these essential novels in one place. One wishes only that McMurtry had provided more commentary; his...
Omnibus collection containing the esteemed Texas author’s first three novels, a loose cycle about the people who live hardscrabble lives on the austere, windswept plains of the Red River country.
The first volume in the present collection put McMurtry on the literary map, if, in some eyes, for the wrong reasons. Horseman, Pass By (1961) takes its title from a sharp-edged lyric by William Butler Yeats, importuning the traveler to “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death.” At the dark heart of the sometimes-sensationalized story is the aimless Hud, a cowboy who knows his way around a rope and steer but hasn’t been well socialized; as played by Paul Newman in the movie, he was a sneering ruffian but less sociopathic than McMurtry’s original. McMurtry slyly alludes to the Yeats poem, writing that the rodeo was the biggest thing to hit the tiny, dusty town of Thalia, and “since it all came like Christmas, only once a year, I was careful not to let any of it pass me by.” Leaving Cheyenne (1963), the second novel, pushes the Thalia story back in time but into familiar-for-McMurtry territory: especially in a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business, when two men fall in love with the same woman, hard feelings ensue. “I wish I knew what all was involved in this loving somebody,” says a principal. “Mostly a lot of damn heartbreak, I know that.” There’s heartbreak aplenty for McMurtry’s own agemates in The Last Picture Show (1966), a brilliant evocation of a time and place—and of the confusion that results when, for whatever intent, people start making a game of love. Jane Austen it isn’t, but McMurtry has followed his characters’ fortunes in a succession of sequels, including Texasville (1987) and Rhino Ranch (2009).
It’s good to have these essential novels in one place. One wishes only that McMurtry had provided more commentary; his introduction, lamenting “the myth of my country, and of my people, too,” is frustratingly short and only hints at what he might have done.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63149-375-1
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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