From deep inside the man’s head there’s no denying the completeness of his transformation, but even so the brutality of the...
Taking a thread from his last novel, The Cosmology of Bing (2001), for his fifth, Cullin uses a true story and his true gift for grit to record the unraveling of a high-school English teacher as he moves a bit too inexorably from heterosexual family life to a gay nightlife, and ultimately to murder.
In a beginning reminiscent of a Terry Gilliam movie, the reader stands on the edge of a world of subterraneans: furtive characters emerging from their sewer- and drain-pipes only long enough to find food and firewood. But the futuristic feel quickly falls away, revealing the city of Phoenix just over the saguaro-studded hill, and one man comes to the fore. Nameless, befriended by a kindly crazy with an idea about zippered cattle as a perfect food source, “the man” sleeps badly and remembers too well. First, he reveals his former middle-class life: nice wife, two great kids, a job he loves. But his wife’s not interested in sex anymore, so night after night, the family asleep, he prowls—first just driving, then visiting the backrooms of an adult bookstore, where he discovers the delights of the “glory holes,” and finally to the dimly lit public toilet in a Phoenix park where the real action is. But an undercover cop is murdered there while the man is busy in a stall, and his double life is undone. Feeling guilty about having bolted the scene (and perhaps about his other secrets as well), he agonizes over what to do, and decides to tell his name and story to the police—an act that instantly makes John Connor a prime suspect. He hides among the homeless, hoping to find his partner from the night of the murder, who can vouch for him. By luck he does, but instead of redemption Connor winds up with another murder on his hands.
From deep inside the man’s head there’s no denying the completeness of his transformation, but even so the brutality of the endgame here seems to go a step too far.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-57962-077-9
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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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