Light and life-affirming fare about letting go of worry and embracing uncertainty.
The further adventures of a tightly wound Manhattan businesswoman and her infuriatingly easygoing father.
Brett apparently has a strong following in her native Australia, but it may not be so for much longer if she keeps moving her characters to New York. Her heroine, Ruth Rothwax, is an Aussie woman of Polish-Jewish descent—her father is an Auschwitz survivor—now relocated to Manhattan, where she runs a thriving letter-writing and greeting-card business. In Too Many Men (2001), Ruth brought her father Edek back to Poland, where she spent the whole time fretting about why he wasn’t more upset by revisiting that den of anti-Semitism; there were times when Edek’s Auschwitz experience seemed to bother Ruth more than it did him. Now Edek has moved to New York and is working in Ruth’s office, where he quickly drives her crazy with his constant scheming and enthusiastic over-ordering of supplies. Ruth’s agitation hits stratospheric heights, though, when Zofia and Walentyna, a pair of widows whom the two had become friendly with in Poland (Zofia and Edek getting more than friendly), show up in New York to live with Edek, and get Green Cards, and in the process manage to bring out all of Ruth’s cattiest tendencies. The irony of the situation is that even as Ruth is railing against Zofia and Walentyna, she is attempting to start a womens’ discussion group the primary purpose of which is to combat such tendencies. Given that much of Brett’s narrative is a headache-inducing ride through Ruth’s encyclopedic array of neuroses—this is a woman who brings steamed vegetables in a Ziploc bag to restaurants—it’s a relief when Edek and his widows (a chaotically appealing trio) announce to Ruth that they want to open a restaurant and need just a smidge of funding. This is a faster, leaner work than Brett’s previous effort. If only the author could find her other characters as interesting as she does Ruth.
Light and life-affirming fare about letting go of worry and embracing uncertainty.Pub Date: July 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-050569-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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
SEEN & HEARD
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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