by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1995
Overlong seriocomic sequel to Pulitizer-winning McMurtry's The Desert Rose (1983). Eight years have passed, and Harmony is still living in Las Vegas, working in a recycling plant, and raising her five-year-old son Eddie alone. As the story opens, this heart-of-gold ex-showgirl is getting the news that her daughter, the 21-year-old Pepper, has just died of AIDS in New York City. Left alone with her grief, Harmony calls her sisters, Neddie and Pat, in her hometown of Tarwater, Oklahoma — both immediately hop on a plane and begin to take control of her life, first by convincing her to bring Eddie and move back to Tarwarter with them. Thus begins the road adventure, as the sisters and Harmony's young son head to the Grand Canyon, the Hopi Mesas (where Eddie finds Iggy, the pup), Canyon de Chelley (where the trailer ends up in the canyon), and Albuquerque, where they ditch the car and fly to Manhattan to discover what Pepper's life was like. There, they meet cab-driver con men, prostitutes, and pimps. But because bright, adorable Eddie insists that everyone like one another and get along, they do. Eventually, they also meet Laurie, Pepper's sweet, heartbroken lover, who follows Harmony and the gang back to Tarwater, but not before Iggy jumps off the Statue of Liberty, ends up (with Eddie) on the Letterman show, and takes a helicopter ride with the President. Harmony's reunion with her dad, Sty, back in Tarwater will provide the healing that she needs — not to mention a grandfather for Eddie. As ever, McMurtry has a knack for warm, affectionate characters, flaky but goodhearted. Even his villains are never all bad. Still, this candy-coated-seeming road novel, even as it tackles themes of grief and healing, grows monotonous.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80998-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK REVIEW
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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by Donna Tartt
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by Donna Tartt
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden
BOOK REVIEW
by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott
BOOK REVIEW
by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson
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