Twenty slight, acerbic stories in which middle-class Chicagoans—old, young, gay, married, parents of children and grown children themselves—search for slender proof that they're loved. Written by a poet who's also the author of Plain Grief (1991), etc. In the first half, Chernoff's imagination tends to be ironic, even sour, rather than intimate or empathetic. In the opening story, ``Jury Duty,'' ``I'' am a writer who bases a character on a lesbian acquaintance who's decided to get pregnant; and I'm so irritated when her life diverges from my story that I resolve to rewrite the story and have her murdered by her lover. In ``The Stockholm Syndrome,'' my old friend, a 60-year-old widow ``with one breast, a woman anyone would call matronly,'' runs away with a man she's met on vacation, leaving her house to her staid, slothful son and his new gay lover. In ``Keys,'' another of my 60-something widowed friends is dying of cancer but isn't on speaking terms with her daughter and grandson, her only living relatives—so when she wins a cheap prize of a stuffed elephant, she asks me to give it to her grandson, but not before telling me a mean, minimal story about her daughter's taste in keychains. And in the title story, a wife having an affair decides to tell her husband (also having an affair) that she knows of his affair and doesn't care—that is, unless the husband responds by telling her she's generous, in which case ``I'll ask him to leave. If he knows enough to be quiet, maybe I'll let him stay.'' In later stories, affections are slightly more developed in the texture of real life and less emblematic and tart, but still—as in ``Kabuki Everything,'' the best piece here, about two friends comforting each other—they are ruled by quirks and random happenstance. A dry, somewhat academic sensibility is at work here—one that will probably not be to every reader's taste.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-79812-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1993
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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