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
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
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
