An effective, if melancholy portrait.
The bestselling author of The Horse Whisperer (1995) returns to the rugged American West for this story of a damaged family’s eventual redemption.
The surface of Evans’s latest is shaped as a mystery. Two skiers on the back trails in Montana find a body encased in ice, and it doesn’t take long for the authorities to identify her as Abbie Cooper, wanted for eco-terrorism and murder. Her parents come to claim her body: Ben from Santa Fe, where he lives with his lover Eve, Sarah from the now-empty family home in Long Island. Sarah’s cruel accusation that Ben is responsible for Abbie’s death spins the story back to when they were a happy family . . . or at least had the appearance of one. Ben was studying architecture and Sarah was in college when they met. They romanced in the usual way, married, had Abbie and Josh and moved to the ’burbs. But the façade of marital harmony shatters on Ben’s 46th birthday at the Divide, a Montana dude ranch, where he meets Eve. Everything that’s wrong with Ben and Sarah (a lot) finally becomes too much to bear. Abbie takes her parents’ split badly, and her youthful enthusiasm for saving the planet at the University of Montana turns dangerous after she meets Rolf, a cell leader for the Earth Liberation Front. When one of their fire-bombings goes wrong, Abbie and Rolf go underground to lead a quasi-criminal existence, despite her parents’ televised appeals to turn herself in. Part thriller, part family drama, the novel is at its best in the analysis of Ben and Sarah’s failed marriage. Evans examines in excruciating detail the intentional injury and petty selfishness that accompany their break-up. Abbie’s disappearance lasts for years, with the FBI still watching the Coopers. It’s up to Josh, shy and usually stoned, to bring the family some closure.
An effective, if melancholy portrait.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15206-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
IN THE NEWS
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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