A Big Apple transit cop's unsuspected taste for forbidden fruits brings him grief and self-awareness: an impressive first novel from New York Daily News columnist Daly. When plainclothes policeman Jack Swann (whose usual beat is the subway system) survives a Times Square shooting, he undergoes a gradual sea change. Cleared of culpability in the death of a black teenager who tried to grab his weapon, Swann begins to take a different view of himself and life. Coming into the light, as it were, the so-called cave cop realizes how little he has in common with coupon-clipping wife Ellen (who unself-consciously refers to herself as a redeemer). By stages, Swann loses weight and takes a second mortgage on his row house in Queens to get money for a more stylish wardrobe and for off-duty jaunts to Manhattan's fashionable watering holes; he even manages a two-day fling at the Plaza with Danica Neary, a lusty blond who was the unattainable object of his high-school fantasies. Swann also becomes more venturesome on the job, using himself and his borrowed bankroll as bait to bust muggers who prey on subway riders. Meanwhile, the working-class hero's behavior soon attracts the attention of superiors, who put the Internal Affairs Division on his tail. IAD operatives report Swann's nocturnal excursions to Ellen, who throws him out of the family home he's hocked. Eventually, the dark side (as it's called in cop talk) charges the officer with having skimmed money from a Harlem drug dealer he and his partner, hip black rookie Simone Colman, arrested in the course of their duties. Swann's conflicts with his department and himself are resolved, albeit with some ambiguity, in a climactic hearing that brings all the players together in a dingy municipal courtroom. A vivid and satisfying slice-of-life tale from an astute observer: Daly's grasp of the urban milieu of ethnic whites could make him heir to Jimmy Breslin's mantle.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-21709-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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