Three-fourths suspense and one-fourth dubious dénouement.
Richmond’s third novel laboriously depicts the nightmare endured by a San Francisco woman after her fiancé’s daughter is snatched from a beach while in her care.
First-person narrator Abby, a photographer in her early 30s, obsessively rehearses the disappearance of six-year-old Emma through the course of this drawn-out suspense novel. Emma scampered ahead on Ocean Beach while she and Abby were looking for sand dollars; Abby gazed down for a few seconds to take pictures of a dead baby seal, and the girl vanished from sight. The shock and guilt are numbing. Emma’s father, Jake, a football player turned high-school teacher, thought he had finally found a loyal life companion; now he isn’t sure he can forgive her. The case becomes a sensation in the local and national press, but there are few clues. Emma’s mother, Lisbeth, a drug addict who decamped years before and never contacted her family, resurfaces to garner self-promotion and attempt a reconciliation with her ex-husband. After a year, Jake begins to lose faith that the case will ever be solved. Abby, however, is convinced Emma is alive and can be found, if only she can remember more details from the time of the girl’s disappearance. The text piles layer upon layer of anticipation in the form of theories by Abby’s librarian neighbor on the functions of memory and hints gleaned from hypnosis. Richmond (Dream of the Blue Room, 2003, etc.) treats a harrowing subject with emotional sensitivity, but the miraculous and hallucinatory final twists create a jarring turnaround from the rest of the novel’s steady realism.
Three-fourths suspense and one-fourth dubious dénouement.Pub Date: March 27, 2007
ISBN: 0-385-34011-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
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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