More than anyone needs to know about poker, but engaging prose and endearing characters bode well for Wener’s new career....
After a turn as a Brit pop star in the mid-’90s, Wener turned to writing fiction. Her US debut—about love, loss, and poker—is an impressive second act.
Audrey Unger is on the edge. She’s a die-hard urbanite living in London with an adoring gardener boyfriend who dreams of moving her to the countryside, a career as a math tutor and part-time bookkeeper, and fantasies of a sexual tryst with the pop star Bono (“a fantastic, filthy, sweaty, dirty shag, on a bed the size of a small Third World country”). Her true obsession, though, is her long-gone father, from whom she inherited her mathematical skills and fascination with scientific fact. When Dad gave up being a schoolteacher to turn professional poker player, with friends like “Jimmy Silk Socks,” Audrey’s mother left him for a sensible man named Frank. But then Audrey’s mother died, her father failed to show up at the funeral to rescue her, and Audrey has spiraled since then from math prodigy to shoplifter. Now 33, she’s clever, charming and “so fearful of things falling apart that I seek to destroy them before they have an opportunity to collapse beneath me.” She’s a lost soul until she meets the 400-pound, agoraphobic, obsessive-compulsive Louie Bloom, who sets her on a path of self-discovery. Louie is a busted-down American hustler who, in exchange for a window box with lavender, agrees to teach Audrey to play poker, a game he approaches with religious fervor (“For an instant you feel like you’re actually living in this world, instead of sitting on the edge of it waiting to die”). Hooked on the game, caught up in Louie’s schemes and ambitions, Audrey risks all on a trip to Vegas that could change her life and dig up her elusive father.
More than anyone needs to know about poker, but engaging prose and endearing characters bode well for Wener’s new career. (Wener’s first novel, Goodnight, Steve McQueen, will be published in early 2005 by Perennial.)Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-058547-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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