The title of Auchincloss's latest fiction is a variation on his Golden Calves (1988), but his moral sensibility remains the same—an insider's understanding of the sins and vanities of upper- class Manhattanites. In these six stories, Auchincloss recasts Greek myth into contemporary fable—none of his errant protagonists are one- dimensional fools or miscreants, but good men led astray by anger, ambition, fashion, and other all-consuming passions. In ``Ares, God of War,'' a Virginia gentleman allows his antebellum sense of honor to degenerate into postwar revenge as an unethical New York lawyer. ``Hermes, God of the Self-Made Man'' is a tale worthy of the best Howells—a successful Yale-educated lawyer during the first half of this century sacrifices love, loyalty, and his identity as a Jew for his ambitions, all of which he justifies by his sense of victimization. In ``Hephaestus, God of Newfangled Things,'' a once- brilliant architect regrets the compromises he made in marriage and career. A crisis of faith underpins ``Polyhymnia, Muse of Sacred Song,'' in which an asexual son of a society matron converts to Catholicism, only to abandon his vocation in a burst of Protestant doubt about Roman dogmatism. ``Charity, Goddess of Our Day'' examines the little-noticed (but perhaps greatest) vanity of the rich, and asks: Charity at what cost? A retired lawyer proposes a morally dubious estates scheme to a wealthy dowager, but is chastened by his own wife. ``Athene, Goddess of the Brave'' strikes a therapeutic note: a grown-up mamma's boy, plagued throughout his life by fears of unmanliness and cowardice, confronts his demons after a particularly humiliating event. In the great world of Auchincloss, the ends never justify the means, and the rich are held to the highest of ethical standards. This may not be a major addition to the author's oeuvre, but it's an always welcome message, delivered with grace and elegance.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-395-60475-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1991
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
