With echoes of Cheever, early Updike, even Shirley Jackson, Schwartz (In the Family Way, 1999, etc.) is master of stories...
Elegant, elegiac stories about people whose lives—like everyone’s—haven’t worked out quite as planned.
“Referred Pain” is a medical term for when “the place where it hurts is not the source of the trouble,” and the characters here struggle to find out why they ache. In the title story, a Kafkaesque tour de force, the son of Holocaust survivors cracks a tooth on an olive pit and turns his ensuing and labyrinthine dental problems into a test of suffering. In “Hostages to Fortune,” the painful realism of a middle-aged couple’s bickering over their children is oddly heightened by the reader’s growing realization that the children are imaginary. The children in “The Trip to Halawa Valley,” however, are all-too-real causes of distress for a divorced couple who come together briefly at their oldest son’s wedding. The two briefly recapture their old intimacy but with it their shared sense of loss and disappointment. The protagonists of “Sightings of Loretta” and “Francesca” are men who learn how little they know, or are known by, their loving wives. Several stories among the 12 here use the writing process almost as metaphor. “Intrusions” lays out an incident—the attempted robbery of the narrator when she was a young mother—then deconstructs and reconstructs the elements to find its real subject: fear of the choices made in a life. “The Word” not written down is lost forever. And the aging novelist of “By a Dimming Light” hires an assistant at the onset of blindness, and the more he depends on the younger man’s decency, the more paranoid he becomes. Many tales also venture into dreamlike surrealism, as in the parallel world of “The Stone Master,” the fairy-tale abstraction of “Twisted Tales,” and the myth-making of “Deadly Nightshade.”
With echoes of Cheever, early Updike, even Shirley Jackson, Schwartz (In the Family Way, 1999, etc.) is master of stories that reflect an era’s uneasy psyche: sad yet wryly comic, told at a slight remove yet deeply moving.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58243-301-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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
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