A severe case of Madonna/whore syndrome plus a hard-to-swallow twist make for a difficult read.
Reeling after a shocking deathbed confession from his wife, a man in this novel tries to put his life back together.
Just before she died from cancer, Elliot Fitch’s beloved wife, Karen, told him he was not the biological father of their teenage daughter, Elena. A year later, Elliot, still filled with depression and rage, is obsessed with tracking down “the man who had destroyed my marriage and my image of my dead wife.” (He now thinks of her as a “cheating whore.”) Meanwhile, he learns that Elena is pregnant. He vows to support her, feeling guilty and not wanting to be the kind of father who “never really gave a fuck about the well-being of the girl he was supposed to have raised into a lady, not a whore.” As Elliot investigates Karen’s former boyfriends—or, as he puts it, “those who had travelled through that sacred territory before I did”—he’s aided by Veronica, a pretty young delivery driver and single mother he met while signing for a sex toy ordered by his daughter. They fall in love while together unraveling the mystery—with surprising results. Parker (Sick Day, 2014, etc.) is a more than competent writer in many ways: He structures his story well, his characters are distinctive, and his dialogue lively. But it’s hard to get past this book’s uncomfortable levels of ick, e.g., father and daughter creepily giggling and teasing each other about masturbation and sex toys or several scenes of masturbation/sex being interrupted by offspring. (Nevertheless, an Elliot/Veronica sex scene is nicely handled.) Elliot’s over-the-top resentment about Elena’s parentage tends to elbow into every interaction: As she vomits, he hopes “that my daughter—who wasn’t biologically mine in the first place—would be okay.” His petty grudges extend back to Elena’s preschool days, when he had to paint her room while she went out with mom for a pedicure. Elliot’s constant poutiness and—sometimes almost literal—dick-measuring betray many unpleasant insecurities. Finally, the trick ending is an implausible groaner.
A severe case of Madonna/whore syndrome plus a hard-to-swallow twist make for a difficult read.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0991764877
Page Count: 302
Publisher: QuoteStork Media, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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