paper 0-87451-878-4 This prizewinning first volume, selected by Garrett Hongo, embraces its own rudeness: an admitted —narcissistic 90’s beatnik,— loncar avoids capital letters and favors no conventional punctuation. His jump-cutting style hops from image to image, creating a collage of incidents and things drawn from a hyped-up world of —post modern tv scrap culture.— Breathless allusions to road movies punctuate free-flowing narratives about a boy, a girl, and a car: in an America of —evangelists and mass murderers and movie stars,— they hurtle from motel to motel, coffee-fueled, sleepless, and grateful for jukeboxes full of Patsy Cline. At times boozy and bluesy, loncar’s short-short poems risk glibness, when they—re not pared down to incoherence. The road narrative culminates in a tragic crash, and sexy Angelina (a soft-porn Garbo)dies—the whole event re-created typographically (and unclearly) in —postscript: landscape with car crash.— —Wallace P. Hipslit, age nine— nicely changes pace with a portrait of a young boy on a swing trying to impress a girl—the poem neatly re-creating the boy’s rhythmic motions. But loncar’s aesthetic better shows itself in the longish —the king of refrigerator poems,— full of all sorts of posturings and boasts: he’s a —poetic hard ass,— with —a willingness to fuck with any/margin foolish enough to come within yards/of me.— Though he imagines himself a threat to the —fascist neo-/formalist— poets, loncar undercuts his own poetic and political conceits with much inspired self-effacement—but even that develops into another tiresome pose.
Pub Date: Aug. 7, 1998
ISBN: 0-87451-877-6
Page Count: 64
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
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
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In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur ("I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct").
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NonePub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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