From the justly touted author of Vanished (a 1988 NBA nominee) and A Dangerous Woman (1991) comes this panoramic view of small- town lifea novel infused with empathy for the flawed and failed who live there. Set in the summer of 1960, the story details how the Fermoyle family and their neighbors are nearly destroyed by a dangerous con man, Omar Duvall. When 12-year-old Benjy Fermoyle witnesses a murder in the woods above his Vermont hometown, then sees the murderer, Omar, appear later that evening with flowers for his mother, Marie, he is not surprised, and tells no one: Benjy has known forever that Omar's coming was ``as inevitable as the summer's fiery sun, and as unstoppable.'' Posing as a peddlar, Omar soon insinuates himself into the family by shrewdly flattering them. Lonely Marie, who gets no help from alcoholic ex-husband Sam in raising Alice, Norm, and young Benjy, is especially vulnerable to his attentions. She not only provides Omar with food and shelter but forges signatures so she can get a loan to invest in the get- rich soap-selling scheme he's touting. As the summer progresses, subplots unfold that parallel and often connect with the Fermoyles' fate: The local police chief has an affair while his wife lies dying; a young priest falls in love with Alice; an insurance salesman, besotted with his wife (a former showgirl), takes to crime; and Sam tries to dry out and get his family back. Meanwhile, the novel gains its thriller-like tension from the children's complex relationship with Omar, a man who makes their mother happy but is increasingly revealed to be both bad and dangerous. By summer's end, ``the malevolence in the air'' has finally dissipated, and the Fermoyles are on surer ground. A grand sweep of a novel: Morris, like a contemporary Dickens, creates a world teeming with incident and characters often foolish, even nasty, but always alive and in your face. (First printing of 75,000; $75,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: Aug. 24, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-86014-X
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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