Examining the Indian diaspora, Alexander (Nampally Road, 1990; a memoir, Fault Lines, 1993; etc.) focuses on one woman's attempt at American assimilation while holding onto her native identity. The story opens with Sandhya Rosenblum sitting in Central Park, culturally adrift. Having married Stephen, a New Yorker whom she met while he was vacationing in her native India five years ago, Sandhya now finds herself living in Manhattan with her husband and their small daughter, Dora, but feeling directionless, with seemingly nothing to do with her life. Stephen, who's barely fleshed out here, was apparently fascinated by the lives of European explorers, and in a sense he has brought Sandhya back as he would a rare and exotic spice. Amid the framework of the plot the Gulf War breaks out, Islamic fanaticism takes clandestine root in New York, and Rajiv Ghandi is assassinated. The cultural backdrop of turmoil seems intended to give consequence and context to Sandhya's plight, but she too is unable to escape one- dimensionality, so much so that the ensuing affair she has with Rashid, a dashing Egyptian scholar, and her suicide attempt following his subsequent rejection add little weight to the story. Also on hand are Sandhya's cousin Jay, a photographer currently living in New York, her other cousins Sakhi and Ravi, now tasting suburban American life in New Brunswick, and Jay's friend Draupadi, a performance artist whose work explores her societal role as the daughter of immigrants. Their tales help to build a resonance of complementary ideas, but however clear and compelling Alexander's general intentions may be, her framework is so highly anecdotal that remain distant and abstract. In the end, at an Indian festival attended by all the characters, it seems at last as if Sandhya may be growing into an independent woman. But too much of her journey has been hidden from view. Lively passages and provocative ideas, but sketchy characters: a near-miss.
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-56279-092-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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