Despite Gayle’s stereotypical characterization of men as bumbling and clueless boys, Duffy’s well-enough drawn to be a...
Lightweight but touching modern relationship story, this time from a male point of view.
To get the obvious comparisons out of the way, British author Gayle’s first US publication (after a previous success, My Legendary Girlfriend, in the UK) isn’t as giddily amusing as Bridget Jones, nor as thoughtfully affecting as Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, and it isn’t as quirkily original as either one, but it has its own distinct hangdog charm. Here, Benjamin Duffy, almost 30, is an aspiring stand-up comic in London whose pleasantly low-key life is shaken up when Mel, his girlfriend of four years, proposes. Though he loves her, and doesn't want to contemplate life without her, Duffy panics at the prospect of marriage. Retreating to his sty of an apartment, shared with best mate and fellow aspiring comic Dan (having lost the woman he loved, Dan has adopted an I-am-a-beer-swilling-unlaundered-island posture), Duffy decides not to make Dan’s mistake—and so says yes. Mel soon detects he doesn’t really mean it, though, and, heartbroken, calls the whole thing off. With the counsel of his brother-in-law Charlie, Dan, along with a great many pints of beer, Duffy attempts to accept the situation, and begins seeing Alexa, “TV’s Hottest Totty,” while Mel starts to spend time with an old boyfriend. Thanks, however, to the hectoring of his sister, and the intervention of his mother, who arranges for her son to meet the father who abandoned them many years before, Duffy realizes that he is not his father—and no longer need fear failing Mel.
Despite Gayle’s stereotypical characterization of men as bumbling and clueless boys, Duffy’s well-enough drawn to be a winning Everyman, and readers will be cheering him on as he heads for his emotional growth spurt.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-50100-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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