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
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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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