An entertaining drama that reaffirms the familiar adage that family and business don’t mix.
In Claud’s debut, a matriarch’s death triggers petty rivalries in a family business.
Even before Ward Mills CEO Dolly Ward passes away from cancer in 1988, Ted Brunson knows that the sun is slowly setting on the textile industry. For years, the family business in South Carolina has held its own among the “Big Five,” but global changes in the textile trade are slowly hitting home. Ted sees that the time has come for the company to be sold; the problem is that he’s an outsider, a Ward by marriage only. Although he’s the heir apparent to Dolly’s position, he might not have enough support from family board members who have other plans for the company. (The son of modest hardware-store owners, Ted is the titular “Dancin’ Man—a metaphorical toy easily manipulated by external circumstances.) To compound the situation, his marriage to Virginia Ward, Dolly’s only daughter, is on the rocks. Virginia also struggles as she tries to make peace with her past, including a strained mother-daughter relationship. Ted’s college friend, Virginia’s brother Sam, is about the only person who’s firmly on his side; years ago, Sam ignored Ted’s lack of blue blood and inducted his future brother-in-law to South Carolina high society. An assortment of other family members, including two Ward brothers that form part of the family’s “Atlanta contingent,” rounds out the cast. Claud’s descriptions of sprawling horse farms, languorous summer evenings and glimpses of Southern wealth (“The lawn rolled out before Ted glowing with the same emerald intensity as the fairways of the Fort Hill Country Club”) add delightful touches to this fast-paced narrative. Yet the story’s tight arc leaves some elements underexplored; it’s never clear, for example, what happens to Ted’s parents after he’s assimilated into the Ward clan. Also, an element of family scandal thrown in at the very end comes across as a tad disjointed and out of place. Nevertheless, this novel about the end of a way of life often makes for transporting reading.
An entertaining drama that reaffirms the familiar adage that family and business don’t mix.Pub Date: March 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0988416499
Page Count: 282
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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.
