Lots of admirable writing about a banally self-centered character.
A debut novel about a young woman who must decide whether to settle for her husband’s suburban dreams.
Emily Ross loves Kevin, her husband of nine years. But she doesn’t want to leave their funky downtown Milwaukee apartment that’s in walking distance of all their friends and favorite restaurants in favor of a suburban home just because mortgage rates are rising, which Kevin portentously points out, often. His other drumbeat has to do with having a baby: You’re not getting any younger, he tells her, often. To 30-year-old Emily, that’s not a persuasive argument. The fact is, she’s not sure about having a baby, but she doesn’t quite understand why. To complicate matters, lately children have been reminding her of tiny Zsa Zsa Gabors, chauffeured around in their tricked-out strollers, imperious and demanding. Normally, Emily would share her fears with her best friend, Meg. But Meg is eight weeks pregnant and positively glowing. Besides, Meg wants Emily to have a baby, too. Into Emily’s perplexity arrives David, a dreamy, dark-haired editor who works for a local paper. He wants her to write a column for him—and possibly something more. Emily walks the knife’s edge as innocent emails between them evolve into strolls in the park and other “non-date” outings. Initially, she forgets to mention she is married, and there never seems a right time to bring it up. When she finally fesses up, their passions usurp the Midwestern morality both thought they possessed. Fox ably evokes the suffocation of a well-meaning but empty marriage and Emily’s guilt-ridden but sexually charged affair. In her misery, Emily makes periodic observations that bring Lorrie Moore’s wit to mind. But while she mentally whips herself for betraying the loveable drudge Kevin, she’s drinking lattes with her fun friend Meg and steaming up the sheets with dashing David.
Lots of admirable writing about a banally self-centered character.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2007
ISBN: 0-307-26491-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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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