Upping the metafictional ante is the question of whether India's bond-trading experiences will inspire her to write another...
Nearly everybody who reads—newspapers, magazines and websites, in addition to fiction—recognizes the plight of the midlist novelist. Not the brand-name superstar, whose annual connect-the-dots release invariably shoots to the top of the bestseller list. Not the highly touted newcomer, whose debut captures the fancy of so many critics, with raves spawning a flurry of other raves, a consensus that will likely curdle with the sophomore effort. Not even the literary trophy novelist, whose renown far exceeds any recent commercial success, but whose prestige adds luster to the publisher's catalog.
No, the classic midlister is no household name, except in the households of some book reviewers, and perhaps in those of the few others who avidly monitor book reviews. Such a readership might represent a cult fandom and guarantee sales in the low thousands. Enough that some imprint, though maybe not the same one, will publish the author's next novel, without expectations on anyone's part that it will fare much better. Martha McPhee's fourth novel wouldn't be so funny if it didn't ring so true. As the narrator of Dear Money, India Palmer has published four novels, none of which has sold more than 5,000 copies, and has written a fifth, which she had “come to hope…would be the winning ticket in the literary lottery where art met commerce.” Though it would be a mistake to reduce India to an authorial stand-in, the delicious irony of McPhee's novel is that it deserves to be her own lottery winner, the breakout book that attracts a popular readership exceeding those drawn by the critical notices and prize nominations for her earlier work. Yet her novel recognizes what a daunting challenge this is, how the publishing industry and celebrity culture make it easier for a tabula rasa newcomer to achieve such attention than for an author who has already established a track record. Finding herself “consumed by want,” India suffers even more because she and her artist husband have become close friends with a wealthier couple who can easily afford the standard of living to which the novelist guiltily aspires. Their expansive social circle encompasses a playboy financier who tempts India into something like an affair, only one where the lust is for money. McPhee has a lot of fun with a couple of archetypes—a Pygmalion transformation of the novelist into a financial high roller and a “city mouse/country mouse” exchange of ambitions—but what makes this novel work so well is that India continues to engage the reader's empathy, even affection, as she forsakes literary high-mindedness for filthy lucre. The novel reflects just how much of an industry publishing is, and how success in financial speculation involves crafting a compelling narrative.
Upping the metafictional ante is the question of whether India's bond-trading experiences will inspire her to write another novel—maybe even one as culturally subversive as McPhee's.Pub Date: June 3, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-15-101165-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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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