A solid historical drama exploring ethical themes, hampered by flawed prose.
A Pennsylvania-set debut novel that spans the 1930s through ’60s with a story of grudges, forgiveness, criminals, and the law.
In South Philadelphia in 1931, some unemployed people line up for a $4 weekly allowance, while others plot crimes instead. Tony Becker ropes 19-year-old Nick Scavello into robbing Jake Moski’s clothing shop; when police officer John Linden hears shots coming from Moski’s, he and his partner run to help. In the ensuing chase, Nick is shot dead, but not before he slashes John in the thigh, causing crippling nerve damage. This opening incident has far-reaching effects: Nick’s brother Al, another petty criminal, vows vengeance on the police; Mark, John’s Drexel University–bound son, harbors bitterness about his father’s injury; and Jake, eager to repay John’s bravery, offers to cover Mark’s college tuition. Mark is the protagonist of the rest of the novel, and as he works his way through law school and marries heiress Gloria Walker, he struggles to abide by his principles. Later, as a district attorney, Pennsylvania governor, and potential presidential candidate, he must resist sketchy propositions from the local crime ring—even when it leads Al and his cronies to threaten his daughter, Susan. Author Charles’ careful research into such details as prices, salaries, and period slang (“He didn’t welsh on any bets and he couldn’t think of anyone who would squeal on him”) lends authenticity to the historical narrative. However, the story’s time jumps feel disjointed; for example, Chapter 3 is set in 1934, Chapter 4 in 1941, and Chapter 6 leaps ahead 13 years. The present-tense narration is a mostly effective strategy, although its lack of consistency (“He pauses, then went on”) is a blot on the style. There are also frequent typos (“it’s you’re fault”; “I guess she feel asleep”), subject-verb agreement issues, and occasionally missing punctuation. However, Charles does maintain the suspense about Susan’s parentage—Mark worries that she’s actually Gloria’s ex-boyfriend Harry St. Clair’s daughter—and about whether Al will pay for his crimes. The unusual title is a metaphor taken from poker: is Mark willing to sacrifice two other people in his race to the top? Or will mercy win out in the end? The book’s gentle, pay-it-forward message—and its unsubtle presentation of the Gospel—gives it the flavor of a morality tale.
A solid historical drama exploring ethical themes, hampered by flawed prose.Pub Date: May 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4959-8252-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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