A vivid if overwrought portrait of another emotionally fragile, sensitive young woman who's saved from self- destructiveand often plain dumbbehavior by finding herself. In settings as disparate as Paris, New York City, and Marin county, the Boston-born Espinosa (Dark Plums, 1995, not reviewed) tells the story of Rosa, a young American woman who, in 1962, flees to Paris ``after a terrible year inside an institution with pastel walls . . . to get away from the accusing, interrogating voices, the turmoil of the past.'' Depressed and sick, she moves in with Antonio, a Chilean writer who not only nurses her but saves her from yet another breakdown. Antonio, 15 years older than Rosa and a mass of contradictory emotions, has never duplicated the critical success of his first novel, published in Chile, and now, bitter and alienated, supports himself by doing odd menial jobs and occasional writing; he is also, except when he's in ``one of his crazy, drunken, nasty moods,'' remarkably intuitive. It's this intuition that keeps Rosa in a relationship that almost immediately becomes sadomasochistic and destructive. The two marry when Rosa discovers she's pregnant; a baby, Isabel, is born; and soon Antonio, who relies on Rosa and her wealthy family for money, is drinking to excess, having affairs, beating and humiliating Rosa, even seducing her own mother when she visits Paris. Finally, the couple moves to the US, where Antonio's dissatisfactions and Rosa's unresolved problems with her family only exacerbate the relationship. A move to California follows, and though the marriage deteriorates even further, Rosa, determined to give Isabel a better life, discovers an inner strength and ambitionthough it's too late for poor Antonio. A powerfully written tale of very messy lives, with all their sordid goings-on spotlightedbut with no shading for relief or credibility.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55885-145-3
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Arte Público
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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
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