Flabby, often implausible plot propelled by original prose.
Four Dubliners regret misguided liaisons with a sadistic Irish politico.
Keyes (Anybody Out There, 2006, etc.) displays her trademark uncanny ability to wring humor from clichés in this story of four women whose paths cross with that of handsome Irish party hack Paddy de Courcy. Lola, whose narration hilariously parodies the article and pronoun-challenged diary of Bridget Jones, learns from the press that Paddy, her boyfriend, is engaged to Alicia, a horsey widow respectable enough to be a political helpmeet. Grace, a Dublin tabloid reporter, and her fraternal twin sister Marnie, met Paddy while all three were students working in a Dublin pub. Grace flirted briefly with Paddy before losing him to Marnie. But as his ambitions escalate, Paddy dumps Marnie, leaving her emotionally shell-shocked. Lola, fashion advisor to Dublin’s nouveau riche matrons, had found Paddy’s sexual proclivities increasingly problematic, but she’s so unsettled by his summary betrayal that she flees to a rustic seaside cabin in County Clare, where she becomes reluctant housemother to a growing contingent of transvestites. A brief fling with a surfer helps her weather Paddy’s rejection, but memories of how his kinky sexuality segued into “isolated” acts of physical abuse undermine her struggle to recover her sense of self-worth. Grace learns that Paddy may be behind the seemingly random torching of her sports car, but withholds her full history with him from the reader. She’s more preoccupied with trying to keep Marnie, who until recently lived happily in London with her commodities trader husband Nick and two daughters, from drinking herself to death. The weight of attention devoted to Marnie’s harrowing alcoholic free-fall deemphasizes and defuses the devastating impact of Paddy’s horrendous behavior. The gradual reveal of Paddy’s monstrosity toward the novels’ women, interspersed with the flip entertainment of Lola’s Bridget Jones-speak, generates a jarring unevenness of tone.
Flabby, often implausible plot propelled by original prose.Pub Date: June 17, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-112402-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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