A thriller that melds Mickey Spillane with Mr. Chips, with predictably chaotic results.
A young man reluctantly takes over his father’s mission against the embodiment of chaos.
If it’s possible to create a genre called “pulp philosophy,” Montag (The Dichotomy, 2015, etc.) has done it. The plot of the author’s latest novel hews to the conventions of pulp fiction, with tough-guy dialogue; bruising, exquisitely detailed fights; world-weary men beaten down by fate; and world-weary women worn down by loving them. The dialogue and interior narration, however, also revolve around the inner workings of a philosophy department at an upstate New York university and the quandary of philosophy in the face of pure chaos. This chaos is embodied in a sinister character known only as the “old man” and his sidekick, O’Grady. Alec McDougal is the son of Alexander McDougal, a philosophy professor at Durcheinander (“chaos” in German) University. There, the “old man” once made an academic conference go horribly wrong, and more than 50 people died. Alec fled to Northern California, but inevitably, he inherits his father’s failed war on the old man and all he represents. The basic plot is fairly simple, but it’s fragmented and refracted through the twin journals of Alec and Alex, each full of surreal visions and dialogue such as, “Steinberg isn’t bringing trouble with him....He’s going to lay bare for all to see the darkness in each of our hearts.” Yet the novel doesn’t reveal the facts of what exactly happened at the doomed conference until 25 pages from the end; up to then, it’s mostly nervous allusions and missing journal pages. It also doesn’t provide clear context for Alec’s initial apocalyptic vision or its connection with any other events—is it a vision of the original conference or a prophecy of a conference yet to come? The very idea of a philosophy lecture devolving into mass slaughter is more than a little absurd, but readers are apparently expected to read it straight and to valorize the men who do the hard, lonely work of thinking about chaos. However, the very text in which this occurs is itself riddled with chaos.
A thriller that melds Mickey Spillane with Mr. Chips, with predictably chaotic results.Pub Date: Dec. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615950303
Page Count: 240
Publisher: RGS Press
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2015
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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