Nevertheless, a vividly imagined story that keeps nagging away at the corners of your mind. The Looking Glass is well worth...
With wry wit and understated compassion, French-British author Roberts (Impossible Saints, 1998, etc.) studies the ironies of loving—and of truly knowing the hearts and minds of those whom one loves.
Roberts’s flavorful new novel consists of two stories related sequentially, though otherwise more or less discrete. The first is orphaned Geneviève Délange’s narrative of her early years in a home run by stern, unloving nuns, the refuge she found in hearing and thereafter inventing stories (the most formative of them is a fable about a mermaid attempting to live outside her element), and her brief happiness in the employ of an indulgent mistress—until the latter’s coarse new husband compromises the servant girl, and Geneviève is sent packing. Thereafter, the novel is divided into several first-person narratives, juxtaposing Geneviève’s account of her new life in the home of amorous bachelor poet Gérard Colbert, with the stories told about him by Gérard’s domineering mother, his young niece Marie-Louise, her English governess Millicent, and Gérard’s out-of-town married mistress Isabelle. All these women are to one degree or another infatuated, if not deeply involved with, the taciturn (though, one presumes, smoldering) Master of the House—and Roberts’s tricky structure suggests a series of mirrors in which these females observe themselves falling under his spell. Comparisons to Jane Eyre are doubtless inevitable, though the Gothic momentum that animates Bronte’s romantic masterpiece is largely missing here, because Roberts seems determined to give each of her women sufficient space in which to reveal the secrets of her heart. This jars against the reader’s compelling interest in Geneviève, whose complex relationships with all the Colberts and rueful sense of her own lowly place (“Sooner or later the mermaid had to return to the sea, which was her only true home”) ought, one feels, to have received higher narrative and thematic priority.
Nevertheless, a vividly imagined story that keeps nagging away at the corners of your mind. The Looking Glass is well worth peering into.Pub Date: July 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-6700-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
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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