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TIETAM BROWN

Name: TIETAM BROWN
Author: Mick Foley
ISBN: 0-375-41550-5

by Mick Foley ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2003

A body slam of a book that’s nowhere near as powerful and decisive as it means to be.

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An engaging protagonist and a lively style aren’t enough to salvage this over-the-top first novel by the former champion pro wrestler (Foley Is Good, not reviewed; etc.).

Narrator Antietam (“Andy”) Brown V is a 17-year-old high-school freshman reconnecting with his absentee father and experiencing a delayed adolescence following “a lifetime of foster homes, orphanages, and juvenile detention centers.” Antietam IV isn’t your ordinary dad: he exercises naked, encourages Andy to follow in his Herculean sexual footsteps, and plots revenge on neighbors whose outdoor holiday decorations outshine his own. Andy has emulated his father’s ferocity, having killed two people before age 14 (as vivid flashbacks gradually reveal). And he has sexual designs on gorgeous born-again Christian cheerleader Terri, plans that are repeatedly foiled by abuse from jocklike fellow students and their foulmouthed idol (and, for reasons that aren’t exactly clear, Andy’s sworn enemy), history teacher-football coach Hanrahan. Foley gets good seriocomic mileage out of Andy’s addled relationship with his volatile, interfering father, who’s initially presented as a broadly comic character, then shown to be a psychotic train wreck of a man with a tangled history of loss, grief, and vengeful breakdowns. And one admires such charmingly weird images as that of “Terri’s bare breasts springing from her bra, like a wire snake from a salted peanut can.” But Foley doesn’t know when to tune it down. Tietam Brown continuously spasms into episodes of cartoonish, sickening violence: we understand that it’s a legacy Andy wants to disclaim, but the point is made repeatedly, and a fairly absurd climactic father-son confrontation imitates the patented method of John Irving, with virtually none of the latter’s narrative drive and sheer reader-friendliness.

A body slam of a book that’s nowhere near as powerful and decisive as it means to be.

Pub Date: July 8, 2003

ISBN: 0-375-41550-5

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.