An ineffectual tearjerker—and a disappointment after Schwartz’s promising debut (Jumping the Green, 1999).
Feelings run riot as five parents reproach themselves for being bad mommies and daddies.
Front and center is Ethan Denton, a young man in the small, unfashionable mountain town of Angels Crest, California. Ethan is euphoric: He has just gained full custody of his three-year-old son Nate after a bitter divorce from Cindy, his former high-school sweetheart and now a raging alcoholic. The story starts with Ethan driving Nate up the mountain to experience the majesty of Nature. Curiously, the normally dependable Ethan leaves Nate alone in his unlocked car and returns to find him missing. Nate will turn up dead in the snow and Ethan will spend the rest of the novel writhing in remorse. Cindy feels bad, too. Admittedly, this was not her screw-up, but hadn’t she swigged vodka while suckling her baby? Other townspeople with bad family histories are Rocksan and Jane, long-time lesbian partners. Rocksan, the masculine one, has been angry since age six, when her father split; and Jane abandoned her baby, George, putting sexual desire before motherhood. The guilt has gnawed at her for 20 years. Now George shows up with his very pregnant girlfriend Melody, and Jane, passing up opportunities to drive the two to the hospital, calmly delivers the baby and wipes away her guilt. Then there’s Rocksan’s sister Angie, who runs the diner and can’t forgive herself for rushing into a second marriage and alienating her daughter Rachel; she’s making amends by raising Rachel’s abandoned daughter Rosie. Finally, there’s Judge Jack, a kindly old gent up from the city to help search for Nate. Ah, contrivance! Ethan will eventually wind up on Jack’s docket, charged with criminal negligence, but Jack will treat him leniently, for he empathizes with Ethan; the judge has made his own mistakes in raising his son Marty, now an addict and a thief.
An ineffectual tearjerker—and a disappointment after Schwartz’s promising debut (Jumping the Green, 1999).Pub Date: June 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-51185-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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