West's 25th novel—a knockout, in-depth, hard-to-put-down show of the author's smarts about the art world, with a murder subplot. A young American in Italy, Max Mather is an art historian and paleologist (scholar of ancient manuscripts) hired by the Palombini family to care for their cache of old, old books and artworks. He's also Pia Palombini's lover, and when she dies, she wills him his choice of a gift from the cache. Looking over the treasures (they're mostly third-rate), he finds mention of a pair of Raphaels, commissioned by the Palombini family in 1605. And, lo, there they are—under a dusty pile, sealed in wax, uncatalogued and unknown to the world. He scoots off to a Zurich safe-deposit with them. Then he sets about becoming an art dealer in Manhattan, with ties in Europe, while plotting to boost the auction price of the paintings up to the $100 millions. He falls in with former lover Anne-Marie Loredon and joins her in setting up a fancy new Soho art gallery, which just happens to be in the building where a possibly great American painter, Madeleine Bayard, had her studio and was murdered. Max and Anne-Marie plan to exhibit the late Madeleine, though the solving of her murder is small stuff set beside Max's slyness in bringing the Raphaels to light in a way that won't have the Italian government compromising a sale of what they may claim to be their national treasures. Max enlists and is hired by Harmon Seldes (read Hilton Kramer), editor of Belvedere; works his way into the cold graces of Henri Berchmans, the world's top art dealer; parries with Edward Bayard, dead Madeleine's lawyer husband; digs up Niccolo Tolentino, who made copies of the two Raphaels in 1945; sets up a front corporation in Zurich to handle his dealings; and is drawn in by Hugh Loredon, Anne-Marie's terminally ill father who is a famed auctioneer and falsely accuses Max's lesbian editor on Belvedere of murdering Madeleine. Deft characters show us how the art world works. Hugely satisfying.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-05895-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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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