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THE TRAIN NOW DEPARTING

Name: THE TRAIN NOW DEPARTING
Author: Martha Grimes
ISBN: 0-670-89154-1

TWO NOVELLAS

by Martha Grimes ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2000

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A pair of thematically connected novellas—about loneliness—by the author of the Richard Jury mysteries (The Stargazey, 1998, etc.) and, most recently, Biting the Moon (1999). At the center of each is a woman leading a life in gunmetal gray. Dissimilar in detail—one protagonist is English, the other American; one has a friend or two, the other seems not to have any—the women are alike in their resignation, in the degree to which their expectations have shrunk. And in their terrible vulnerability, which in both cases is exploited by a powerful man. In “The Train Now Departing,” the American story, much of what happens takes place over a Magritte-like series of lunches. Having begun quite accidentally, they have become self-perpetuating, ritualized. The man (neither character is named) is a well-known travel writer who hates to travel. The woman, on the other hand, would like to travel—and has the means to, as her companion insists on pointing out—but she has long ceased to regard herself as a person who travels. They pick at each other with increasing skill: obligatory mini attacks—not meant to hurt really, mounted mostly because the other is there. In “When The Mousetrap Closes,” Edith Parenger meets Archie Marchbanks in her favorite tea shop. He's a brilliant young actor; she's a longtime admirer. When she recognizes him, she forces herself to go to his table, behavior atypical enough to be heart-fluttering and, later, inexplicable. He, however, is kind. More than that, he seems actually eager to pursue an acquaintanceship. As in the first story, there is nothing overtly sexual in the relationship, yet both women are heavily invested. Also as in the first, the end, when it comes, is bruising. Clear-eyed, nuanced probings into the cruelty of isolation, and though persuasively sad, neither novella is at all sentimental. But readers who come to Grimes for a Richard Jury-like experience should be warned: these are lives of very quiet desperation.

Pub Date: May 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-670-89154-1

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE RED QUEEN
by Martha Grimes

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by Martha Grimes

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THE KNOWLEDGE
by Martha Grimes

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.