Noted Israeli writer Shalev (The Blue Mountain, 1991) takes his time getting nowhere in particular as he tries to put a contemporary spin on the legendary biblical story of a lost inheritance and sibling rivalry. Set in Israel, the story is narrated by Esau, who fled to America when his beloved Leah was wooed and won by twin brother Jacob. Now in his late 50s, Esau is back home visiting his dying father, Abraham Levy, a descendant of illustrious sages but a baker by trade, who had fallen in love and married the splendid red- haired Sarah, daughter of Russian peasant converts who had immigrated to Israel early in the century. Humiliated by the loan her family made after his business was destroyed by an earthquake in 1927, Abraham soon, to Sarah's great sorrow, ignored her. Esau recalls his parents' courtship, his village childhood, his rivalry with Jacob, and the events that led to his flight. He also includes stories of Jacob, who stayed behind with Leah and still works in the bakery. In America, Esau became a food writer, but he never forgot his deep love for Leah or for his mother, though Sarah cursed him when he left home, telling him that ``you won't have family of your own... You won't have wife of your own... You won't have child of your own.'' Which all came to pass. The family history doesn't make the impact it should: Jacob's son is killed in Israel's War of Independence, and Leah, overwhelmed by grief, sleeps the rest of her life away. Though she bears another son, conception and birth do not interrupt her slumber. Nothing is resolved despite pretentious hints, fleshed out by tiresome bits of magic realism (an old aunt has miraculous suckling powers) that promise more. For all its bravado and braggadocio, this novel never quite goes mano a mano with its subject. Arm wrestling without the table.
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-019040-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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