An indelibly etched mood piece for readers who don’t insist that every action needs to provoke an equal and opposite...
A Brooklyn junkyard is the center of this first novel’s hopeless universe of dully endangered crooks.
Fat Tommy Rosselli, a.k.a. Tommy Bagadonuts, is the alleged brains behind the Troutman Street operation, part salvage-yard, part chop-shop. Stoney, his partner, is an alcoholic whose grip on reality is no tighter than his hold on his family. Their employees range from yard boss Walter to used-truck chassis buyer Jimmy the Hat to Eddie Tuco, a “Nuyorican” gofer, 18, whose refusal to join his cousin Miguel’s gang has already marked him as somebody who goes his own way. After a menacing curtain-raiser in which Tuco discovers two dead teenagers when he comes in to work, Green settles down to a leisurely, yet somehow still menacing, round of anecdotes about Stoney, Tommy, and their colleagues in the salvage business. But he takes a special interest in Tuco, because although the kid is low man on the junkyard’s totem pole, he’s the only one who’s going anywhere, even as far as the nameless prostitute down the street. Just as the hooker is looking forward only as far as her next fix of “Dr. Jack,” the drug that’s given her seller-pimp the same reputation as famed suicide enabler Dr. Jack Kevorkian, Stoney and Tommy seem to have nothing better to do than mark time and hire futile protectors as whoever killed those two kids and executed junkyard accountant Marty Cohen closes in on them. The setup screams thriller, but Green throws away one sharp, threatening incident after another—and eventually his whole plot—because he’s after something more subtly disturbing: a group portrait of despair so deep that getting killed just doesn’t seem like that much of a risk.
An indelibly etched mood piece for readers who don’t insist that every action needs to provoke an equal and opposite reaction.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018822-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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