A lively and beautifully crafted novel about the anguish of belief.
An astute novel that asks us to take seriously the possibility that Harold Peeks, a relatively mild-mannered computer salesman, is in fact the Son of God, as he announces.
Egerton (stories: How Best to Avoid Dying, 2007, etc.) keeps us deftly balanced between two equally plausible possibilities—that Harold is divine and capable of miracles or that he’s an authentic wacko. In accepting an award for Most Improved Sales Analyst, for example, Harold claims that he might indeed have “an unfair advantage since I am Christ, the Son of God. But thank you all the same.” One thing’s for sure—he’s here to challenge the way we live our lives, and no one is more aware of this fact than fellow computer salesman Blake Waterson. At the beginning of the novel, Blake lives a quintessentially American existence—he’s married to Jennifer, a woman he adores, and has an adolescent daughter named Tammy. They have a comfortable life in Houston, and we infer that Blake has never been inspired to question the general rightness of his life. When Harold quits the computer company, he turns to Blake and tells him he should quit as well because it’s not his vocation. While it might be an exaggeration to say that Harold “performs” miracles, they certainly seem to follow in his wake. When Harold decides to make a pilgrimage from Houston to Austin, Blake and a few ragged others follow him. Toward the end of the journey, Blake finds out that Jennifer, who has been estranged from Blake since he unfathomably began believing in Harold, is ill. Blake rushes back to be with her, but when she dies, he begins to question the nature of a universe—and a God—that could let such suffering happen. The story is narrated with consummate skill, moving nimbly from Blake’s narrative, told in retrospect, to documents from the church of “Haroldism” that grow up around its enigmatic founder.
A lively and beautifully crafted novel about the anguish of belief.Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9844488-0-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dalton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
