A promising but belabored start. The three story lines mesh only when forced.
The stories of a diva-in-training, a corporate lawyer and a mid-19th-century tenor are connected by Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, in Gallaway’s ambitious debut.
On his 41st birthday, Martin, prominent attorney and music lover, watches the 9/11 catastrophe from his office in a nearby Manhattan skyscraper, walks home seven miles to Washington Heights and resolves to alter his life. In the 1860s, Lucien, son of scientist Guillaume (who’s working on an anti-aging vaccine), is taken under the wing of his Parisian neighbor, a Romanian princess. Under her patronage, Lucien develops his natural gifts as a tenor, studying with the finest teachers. Maria, born in Pittsburgh in 1960, displays remarkable talent as a soprano and is noticed by Anna, a retired diva who helps secure her admission to Juilliard on scholarship. Martin, also of Pittsburgh, and Maria are the same age, and their paths have crossed before—Maria’s parents were both employed by Martin’s father. Both children were adopted and, on the verge of adulthood, lost their parents in fluky, fiery accidents. The three protagonists' lives are all touched, integrally and/or peripherally, by Wagner’s Tristan. Lucien debuts as Tristan when mad King Ludwig of Bavaria bankrolls a production of the dissonant opera that Paris considered too outrageous. Martin purchases the house of a reclusive tenor, Leo Metropolis, whom he had seen perform as Tristan. Metropolis crops up to give Maria career-transforming advice. After Eduard, Lucien’s lover, kills himself because the Hapsburg emperor condemns his architectural masterpiece, Lucien returns to Paris, only to suffer at the caprice of another emperor, Louis-Napoléon, who orders a human trial of Guillaume’s vaccine. Lucien joins his father as a guinea pig to test the highly toxic potion. Only one will survive—for a long, long time. Easily overlooked details present, upon review, a pleasingly intricate puzzle, but the novel’s cerebral tone, didactic digressions and rote characterizations often make for arduous reading.
A promising but belabored start. The three story lines mesh only when forced.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-46342-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
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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