Despite good intentions, more about the idea of a friendship than the reality.
An energetic, if not always persuasive, attempt to detail why a friendship made in college between two women endures despite family scandals, different lifestyles, and the men they marry and divorce.
Narrator Clare Man meets Sally Rose in 1973 at Oberlin College, where the two freshmen are assigned to share a room. Wealthy, Jewish Sally comes from California. Protestant, middle-class Clare is a native of Ohio. Sally is devoted to her family, especially father Sid, a publisher, who calls every day. Clare is impatient with her family, especially with her mother, a teacher. Though Clare is a free spirit, Sally more reserved and cautious, the two soon become close friends. Clare’s summer visit to the Rose home further cements the attachment; soon Sid, mother Esther, and younger brother Ben become as much her family as Sally’s. But there are no perfect families, not even in exciting, warm California. As Clare becomes a doctor, marries and divorces twice, gives birth to a daughter, and works with AIDS patients, the Rose family falls apart. Sally, now a lawyer, marries handsome Flavio, only to find him seducing Ben one day in the pool house. Ben then becomes a heroin addict; Esther commits suicide; and Sally tries to help her brother by buying drugs for him. Eventually, when Clare learns that Sid publishes brutally graphic pornography and may also be implicated in Ben’s recent death, she nearly stops seeing Sally. But true friendship survives all kinds of blows (there are more to come, too), and the women enter middle age as close as ever. Newcomer Moody, a Ohio-based physician, is at her best evoking the period, from the last days of college protests to the onset of AIDS. She is less successful in showing just why Sally was so important to Clare.
Despite good intentions, more about the idea of a friendship than the reality.Pub Date: June 4, 2001
ISBN: 1-57322-188-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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