Thematically rich but overstocked with underdeveloped characters.
A short, debut novel about race, ambition, and money in modern Milwaukee.
Winfield Payton, a professor of English, spends the downtime in his classes crafting “ideas for bad movies” to pitch to production companies. He works on business deals, too, as the communications director for Frederick Douglass Savings and Loan. As the story opens, the bank is looking for investors in Brewer’s Court, a gentrification project on the banks of the Milwaukee River. Winfield seems game to be Frederick Douglass’ token white representative; as Brooks Adams, the bank’s African-American head, says, “We need a chiclet—a white guy—to be our public face from time to time.” The search for money to finance Brewer’s Court forms the book’s central, overarching plot, but some chapters read as self-contained stories (and one was previously published as such in 2014 in The Great American Literary Magazine). The bank faces opposition from Father Moses, an African-American alderman who says that he believes in “building homes for the ‘hood! Not some Yuppie palace for a bunch of crackers and Oreos, man!” Connelly frankly raises issues of race, class, and stereotypes, especially after Brooks and Winfield wind up laundering Nigerian drug money. The book’s title is truly apt, as most of the characters aim—through skill, bargain, or pretense—to move outside their current circumstances. But although Connelly ably tackles some weighty themes, his style make the story seem more like a TV episode than literary fiction, due to a lack of back story and dense, dialogue-heavy text that’s full of pop-culture references. For example, he describes Brooks’ brother Lionel as “no James Dean, blackened to the eyes, stumbling from his roadster in Giant proclaiming a fountain of instant wealth.” The novel’s dated depiction of women may also alienate some readers; with the exception of Keisha Jackson, a lawyer for Frederick Douglass, they’re described with such phrases as “bosomy blondes” or “the brunette with the melons.”
Thematically rich but overstocked with underdeveloped characters.Pub Date: May 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9976079-0-1
Page Count: 188
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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