Few surprises on the road to rapprochement, but the belles’s barbed commentary never fails to entertain.
Southern belles hell-bent on belated truth-telling in West’s latest wacky outing (Mad Girls in Love, 2005, etc.).
After a six-month saltwater-taffy binge on North Carolina’s outer banks, Renata, a screenwriter, is shopping for a cashmere sweater to send to her sweetie, Ferg, a director who’s on location in Dublin shooting the “remake” of James Joyce’s Ulysses. She spots a tabloid depicting Ferg in a pub in the clutches of “man-eating actress” Esmé Vasquez, who plays Molly Bloom. After the shopkeeper inflicts an impromptu mullet on Renata, she flees to Alabama, into the sheltering arms of her paternal grandmother, Honora, who’s hosting an engagement party for Louie, Renata’s daddy. When, after a few too many flutes of champagne, Renata confronts Louie’s fiancée, squeaky-voiced Joie, in Honora’s attached garage, Joie rips off Renata’s pearls. Later, Joie is found comatose in the garden pond, and a few loose pearls in drops of blood on the garage floor point to Renata as the suspect. Still above suspicion is Honora’s friend Isabella, a former Hollywood actress who’s inserted Lord knows how many valiums in the chocolate-covered strawberries Joie was last seen gorging on. Isabella thinks it’s high time someone told Renata about the secrets harbored by her mother, Shelby, who, long divorced from controlling cardiologist Louie, has recently perished in a plane crash with her longtime second husband, a movie producer. Family retainer Gladys, Isabella and Honora alternate revelations. In 1972, Shelby had an affair with studly hairdresser Kip. Shelby’s father was accidentally shot while quail hunting with Kip and Louie. After Shelby almost drowned while cavorting with Kip, she and Louie reached a turbulent truce. Isabella’s affair with Louie and her compulsion to lace comestibles with pharmaceuticals caused her husband’s not-so-accidental death. More brutal unveilings follow, until Renata achieves a rueful understanding of her father’s and lover’s motives.
Few surprises on the road to rapprochement, but the belles’s barbed commentary never fails to entertain.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-018405-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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