A book that shocks one to the fibre of one's being. Did it have to be written? Or if written published? In comparison the shock techniques of The Naked and the Dead and From Here to Eternity seem pallid. At least there was humorous relief, there were redeeming characteristics in some of the men, there were evidences of humanity. In The Dark Arena the picture of occupation forces, military and civilian, seems to indicate that all are tarred with the brush of self seeking, cruelty, barbarity, indifference to human suffering, the vices of the conquerors, the cupidity of the thwarted, the sadism of those whom suffering has scarred. The central figure, Mosca, comes home to a rejoicing family, to the fiances who had waited out his years of war. He turns against them, taking pleasure in hurting them — and goes back to Germany, in a civilian post. Back, too, to Hella, the German girl who had born and lost his child. He takes her on again, but even when he could apply for marriage papers, puts it off. They have another child- and still the papers are not ready. This time an officer he had insulted is holding them up. Mosca cushions his pay with black market operations, battening on the fears of the Germans. But when he feels his security threatened he deserts his partner in crime. In the end, his betrayals of all human compassion catch up with him; he is tricked with bad drugs when Hells is ill; he kills the man who has fooled him, cost Hella her life; he deserts his unwanted son; and he walks out on everything, going underground in a hostile land. The story is there to be told unpalatable as it is. But the sneering characterization at every level, the filthy language, the presumption that there was no decency anywhere- (except perhaps in Hella, the German girl), leaves a bad taste- a sense of profound shock.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0345441699
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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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