A lugubrious but moving account of a disturbed young woman’s troubled childhood and adolescence, by New Orleans second-novelist Friedmann (The Exact Image of Mother, 1991). Eleanor Rushing, like most orphans, suffers from a profound inner solitude that she has carried well into adulthood. “In case you don—t know it already, there is nothing worse than being a captive audience to dead silence.” Eleanor’s parents were killed in an airplane crash when she was ten, and she was brought up in New Orleans by Poppy (her grandfather) and Naomi (Poppy’s black housekeeper). Poppy is the silent type, as grim as cast iron and talkative as a post—which may be just as well, since when she learns of her parents” death Eleanor is struck dumb and doesn—t speak a word for the next four years. Her silence, though, may also be the result of a molestation by Naomi, who broke the news to Eleanor at her summer camp and then drove her home to Louisiana. Certainly it seems more than coincidental that Eleanor regains her speech at 14, the year she’s raped by a Tulane frat-boy. Given her catalogue of traumas, it isn—t surprising that Eleanor should eventually fall in love with Methodist preacher Maxim Walters. After following him to a convention in Nashville and starting an affair, she tries to convince him to leave his plain wife and start over with her. But Maxim worries about his reputation and even goes so far later as to request a restraining order to keep Eleanor away from him. The court that investigates Maxim’s complaint finds not only that she and Maxim were never lovers, but that Eleanor’s parents never died in any plane crash. Is Eleanor insane? Or merely deluded? The boundary between reality and fantasy can be elusive, especially when clouded by a succession of griefs. Depressing overall, but curiously affecting: Friedmann writes with a sensitivity that can touch the heart without falling prey to the sentimental. (First printing of 25,000; author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-58243-003-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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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