The three fictional memoirs that make up Auchincloss's (False Gods, etc. etc.) latest all illustrate classic personality types. But even Auchincloss's Freudianism is characteristically WASP-ish- -restrained, nonreductive, and glossed by his refined moral sensibility. Nathaniel Chisolm (``The Epicurean'') rejects his father's work ethic for the life of a bon vivant. If, for him, his father represents duty and responsibility, his mother, who lives most of the time in Paris, embodies the pleasure principle. Nathaniel even betrays his factory-owning father in order to bed an attractive unionist. A Harvard hedonist, he briefly dedicates himself to the war effort, only to return home to a life of fox-hunting and polo. Marriage leads to a period of artistic dilettantism in Paris, which he abandons for a successful Wall Street career, only to be wiped out by the Crash. If Nathaniel discovers too late that ``pleasure in vitiated by total selfishness,'' his example is hardly a simple morality tale. Each of Auchincloss's character studies is tempered by his profound sense of time and place. The dowager narrator of ``The Realist'' rejects the myopic view of contemporary feminism (represented by her daughter) that cannot account for the power she wielded by nurturing her husband's career—though even her healthy realism has its ethical limits. ``The Stoic is perhaps the most complex piece, a study in the slippery slope of amoral behavior that turns into revenge. Like his mentor, the great financier Lees Dunbar, George Manville readily accepts and exploits the world's follies. However much he succeeds as a capitalist titan, George suffers greatly for his vanity and arrogance. His genial revenge against a decadent class leaves him a study in loneliness. Once again, America's last patrician novelist renders a not- so-distant past intelligible and relevant to today. Neither nostalgist nor class traitor, he remains above all an artist.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-395-65567-6
Page Count: 213
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy,...
Britisher Haddon debuts in the adult novel with the bittersweet tale of a 15-year-old autistic who’s also a math genius.
Christopher Boone has had some bad knocks: his mother has died (well, she went to the hospital and never came back), and soon after he found a neighbor’s dog on the front lawn, slain by a garden fork stuck through it. A teacher said that he should write something that he “would like to read himself”—and so he embarks on this book, a murder mystery that will reveal who killed Mrs. Shears’s dog. First off, though, is a night in jail for hitting the policeman who questions him about the dog (the cop made the mistake of grabbing the boy by the arm when he can’t stand to be touched—any more than he can stand the colors yellow or brown, or not knowing what’s going to happen next). Christopher’s father bails him out but forbids his doing any more “detecting” about the dog-murder. When Christopher disobeys (and writes about it in his book), a fight ensues and his father confiscates the book. In time, detective-Christopher finds it, along with certain other clues that reveal a very great deal indeed about his mother’s “death,” his father’s own part in it—and the murder of the dog. Calming himself by doing roots, cubes, prime numbers, and math problems in his head, Christopher runs away, braves a train-ride to London, and finds—his mother. How can this be? Read and see. Neither parent, if truth be told, is the least bit prepossessing or more than a cutout. Christopher, though, with pet rat Toby in his pocket and advanced “maths” in his head, is another matter indeed, and readers will cheer when, way precociously, he takes his A-level maths and does brilliantly.
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy, moving, and likely to be a smash.Pub Date: June 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50945-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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