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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
