A malevolently thrilling coming-of-ager wrapped in a philosophical detective tale.
A research project takes a college freshman into lands of the mind and soul he never knew existed—or wants to remember.
Written in flashback by its haunted protagonist, this first outing trades in clichés but makes them somehow sing together in beautiful unison. There’s the setting of Aberdeen College, your prototypical Northeastern enclave of moneyed academia, thick with Gothic architecture and privilege, where “the tang of New England countryside has seeped into your skin . . . [where] it will remain, tendrils of ivy forever enshrouding your limbs.” There’s the narrator, Eric Dunne, 16 and on an academic scholarship that’s rescued him from his foster family and New Jersey, who is introduced to the joys of full-time study, the mystery of death and the pinch of unrequited love. Then there’s the story, as young Eric is roped into a research project run by Dr. Cade, one of the bright lights of Aberdeen and working on a history of the Middle Ages, which a coterie of students mostly writes for him. The other students, Art, Howie and Dan, are a high-functioning band of misfit geniuses ensconced in Dr. Cade’s remote old house, getting stinking drunk when they aren’t arguing over esoteric details of philosophy or decoding dusty history texts for the project. Eric knows from the get-go that all isn’t as it seems at Aberdeen, of course, what with the librarian he’s been assigned to appearing to be 150 years old (and insane to boot), and Dr. Cade’s other assistants being engaged in mysterious alchemical research. Add to all this the fact that Eric’s out of his skull in love with Art’s smashingly gorgeous and fiercely intelligent girlfriend and you’ve got the makings for Nathan’s dark concoction. Plenty here is just writerly show-off—mood-setting and plumbing the depths of Eric’s loneliness-ravaged, ultra-intelligent soul—but sometimes that’s more than enough for any one novel.
A malevolently thrilling coming-of-ager wrapped in a philosophical detective tale.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-5082-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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