Much too brief encounter with some very likable characters.
Writer confronts middle-aged angst while studying happiness, in a third by Grunwald (New Year’s Eve, 1997, etc.).
Sally Farber leads an enviable Manhattan life of letters. The mother of two well-behaved preteen daughters, she’s contentedly married to childhood sweetheart Michael, an earnest, dedicated doctor. But she’s blocked on The History of Happiness, the fourth in her series of concept books. Her writing-avoidance research into various felicity formulas derived from advertising, philosophy, laughter therapy, pop-psyche, Smiley Faces and Bobby McFerrin (mercifully sans singing fish) provides the struts for the slight plot of this engaging story. Sally is not always impervious to undermining by her needy, overprivileged girlfriend, T.J., an editor whose own maxim for bliss is: “I just had to do something for myself.” When Sally’s childhood apartment overlooking Central Park West is vacated by the death of a tenant, her elderly mother enlists her to prepare it for sale. Soon, her daughters head off to camp for two months, and Sally weathers her first experience with empty-nest syndrome. At the wedding of T.J.’s sister, Sally exchanges erotic sparks with lusty-for-life painter Lucas Ross. She takes Lucas up on his innuendos, and Mom’s apartment becomes the ideal trysting spot. Lucas increases property values by covering the bedroom’s floor and wall with his signature didactic friezes. The lovers share superior sex (and chocolate) and somehow miss colliding with T.J., who also has a key. But T.J. does succeed in enlisting Marathon Ross, Lucas’s X-ray wife, as a decorating consultant for the apartment, which leads to the premature and disappointing end. Grunwald’s prose is smooth, the dialogue between Sally and Lucas is deliciously trenchant. By contrast, Sally’s conversations with Michael are flat and opaque, belying her professed depth of feeling for him. Although not always relevant to the action, the segments on happiness are satisfying in an Alain de Botton sort of way. Book clubs will welcome the talking points.
Much too brief encounter with some very likable characters.Pub Date: June 7, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6299-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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