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BLACK OLIVES

Name: BLACK OLIVES
Author: Martha Tod Dudman
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4960-4

by Martha Tod Dudman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 2008

Sometimes annoyingly self-absorbed, but at its best, a story delivered with clarity, elegance and the oomph of lived...

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Memoirist Dudman (Expecting to Fly, 2004, etc.) turns to fiction in this brief novel about middle-aged passion.

Virginia is in the olive aisle of her local gourmet grocery when she sees David for the first time since he dumped her nine months earlier after a ten-year affair. Virginia flees the store, then impulsively climbs into the backseat of David’s truck. When he returns to the truck and starts to drive, she stays hidden under a jumble of his old sweaters, reminiscing about their relationship. The affair began when she was a 40-year-old divorcee with two kids and a job managing an ad agency. He was ten years older, also divorced, with grown kids and a business never described. During the early years he was madly in love and repeatedly proposed marriage. She repeatedly refused. She loved having a boyfriend, but liked to keep him at arm’s length. Preoccupied with friends, family and job—although details remain fuzzily in the background in her obsessive retelling—she never paid him the attention he craved. Later on, she found David’s increasing depression annoying, and their sexual relationship, so central in their early years together, became problematic as well. Moreover, his desire to talk over his issues with her made her feel pressured. In their last year together her strongest feeling toward him became irritation. Ironically, since he rejected her, she has been obsessed with David. Now arriving at his house, Virginia still avoids revealing herself. She escapes the car when he goes inside. When he leaves again, she finds her way inside his house. Lying on his bed, she relives New Year’s Eve, when he admitted he’d begun seeing someone else. Virginia is unflinching in her self-portrait, sorting through her true and egoistic emotions until she recognizes David, and herself, for who they really are.

Sometimes annoyingly self-absorbed, but at its best, a story delivered with clarity, elegance and the oomph of lived experience.

Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2008

ISBN: 978-1-4165-4960-4

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
EXPECTING TO FLY
by Martha Tod Dudman

- BOOK REVIEW
AUGUSTA, GONE
by Martha Tod Dudman

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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.