A rollicking, funny, surprisingly thoughtful sendup of the current climate of political discontent.
In Bloom’s satire, a New Jersey man punches out a Republican senator campaigning for the presidency and becomes a national sensation.
Harry McBride is an ornery gravel worker in New Jersey. Just like his father who left him, his “prospects of escape diminish[ed] with each year spent swinging that big scoop shovel.” When he has the opportunity to shake the hand of Idaho Sen. Joseph P. Landon, a “true blue Republican” running for president, he clocks him in the face without so much as uttering a word. A stunned Landon ends up in the hospital with a broken nose and tailbone, and Harry somehow eludes capture by Secret Service agents and flees with the intention of making it to Mexico. Grover Budd, a bombastic radio personality clearly modeled on Rush Limbaugh, tries to demonize Harry, suggesting he’s part of a conspiracy organized by the Democratic Party to humiliate Landon. But Harry becomes a huge hit, his skyrocketing popularity fueled by social media. The principal reason he isn’t immediately caught? Most people are unwilling to turn him in. As one political strategist succinctly puts it, Harry encapsulates all the things the public at large is fed up with: “Of politicians and lobbyists, of backroom deals and huge corporations getting all the breaks while they cheat and exploit people like him. He’s sick and tired of all that and he’s sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Capturing this feeling of cultural frustration is one of Bloom’s (Hello, My Name Is Bunny!, 2018, etc.) chief strengths. At first, Harry seems unsure why he assaulted the senator, but that ambiguity isn’t ambivalence—like the electorate of which he is a microcosm, he’s seething with anger. The author masterfully allows that contempt and confusion to cohabitate within the story. Budd’s character is the one misstep—he’s drawn hyperbolically into a cartoon caricature, especially conspicuous during a grim sex scene. However, that lack of sensitivity is only so obvious precisely because it’s such a stark departure from the thoughtfulness of the rest of the book.
A rollicking, funny, surprisingly thoughtful sendup of the current climate of political discontent.Pub Date: March 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-950437-27-6
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Adelaide Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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