Octogenarian Sage debuts with 14 wry and moving tales, all marked by their depth of perception into the workings of the human heart. This slim volume revels in the complexities of the simple life, parading forth an assortment of country rascals and city sophisticates encountering the challenges inherent in growing up and growing old. Two stories, equal in their eloquence and sassy spirit, fondly recall characters from the narrator's past: ``Sunday School on the Chicaqua'' remembers Bay, who moved from Mississippi to the Yankee North long ago, and is now impromptu chef of the Sunday Schoolthat is, the cottage where the local men gather to drink, tell tall tales, and play poker while their wives and children attend church. The story meanders effortlessly, winding in and out of wise old Bay's anecdotes on the river. ``Room 409'' portrays a couple of Depression-era college students living the high life in San Francisco off Hadley's family fortune. Hadley and Jackson meet on college steps where they form a fast and true friendship, which turns into romance once a week in room 409 of the swankiest hotel. Now in his 80s, Jackson recalls the bittersweet affair on notice of Hadley's death, realizing too late what he had thrown away. Meanwhile, ``Bib Overalls'' and ``Moe's 3 Birds'' tell sprightly tales of adolescent romanceMoe is ``ugly as mud and not too bright but she sure as hell knew what it was with boys and girls'' and was also the town's sharpshooter, producing inestimable pride in her 13-year-old beau. Other offerings present a darker panorama: a man tries to get through Czech customs with his wife's ashes; a mother who spies on her daughter's front-porch fumblings later confronts the boyfriend, offering her own brand of advice and comfort. Piercing observations paired with wonderfully comic phrasing: small gems from a master of the form.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-57003-064-2
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
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