With each new work, Auster (Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, etc.) is quickly becoming our preeminent novelist of ideas—a postmodern fabulator who grounds his odd and challenging fictions in conventional and accessible narrative structures. In Auster's latest, a narrator much like himself (a novelist named Peter Aaron) tries to solve the mystery of his best friend's life and death. When he reads a news report of an unidentified man blowing himself up on a Wisconsin roadside, Aaron knows it must be his friend Benjamin Sachs, a once-promising novelist who became a "crazed idealist." Ever since his days in jail as a war resister, Sachs maintained "an attitude of remorseless inner vigilance." His Thoreauvian vision of "personal salvation" through politics eventually results in his strange career as the Phantom of Liberty—an anarchist bomber who blows up replicas of the State of Liberty in town-squares across America. Aaron accepts responsibility for the turn of events because he is "the place where everything begins." Through him, Sachs meets the nutty conceptual artist who in turn identifies the victim of a bizarre murder committed by Sachs, himself "an emblem of the unknowable." As much as this is the story of Sachs's twisted pursuit of mercy and forgiveness, it is also a journey of self-discovery for the narrator, who must deal with his own acts of desire and betrayal. Auster's abstract intentions here are more than balanced by his sense of intrigue and character. In a world thrown off-balance by uncertainty and chance, he pursues facts with the determination of a hard-nosed detective.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-670-84676-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992
Steinbeck's peculiarly intense simplicity of technique is admirably displayed in this vignette — a simple, tragic tale of Mexican little people, a story retold by the pearl divers of a fishing hamlet until it has the quality of folk legend. A young couple content with the humble living allowed them by the syndicate which controls the sale of the mediocre pearls ordinarily found, find their happiness shattered when their baby boy is stung by a scorpion. They dare brave the terrors of a foreign doctor, only to be turned away when all they can offer in payment is spurned. Then comes the miracle. Kino find a great pearl. The future looks bright again. The baby is responding to the treatment his mother had given. But with the pearl, evil enters the hearts of men:- ambition beyond his station emboldens Kino to turn down the price offered by the dealers- he determines to go to the capital for a better market; the doctor, hearing of the pearl, plants the seed of doubt and superstition, endangering the child's life, so that he may get his rake-off; the neighbors and the strangers turn against Kino, burn his hut, ransack his premises, attack him in the dark — and when he kills, in defense, trail him to the mountain hiding place- and kill the child. Then- and then only- does he concede defeat. In sorrow and humility, he returns with his Juana to the ways of his people; the pearl is thrown into the sea.... A parable, this, with no attempt to add to its simple pattern.
Pub Date: Nov. 24, 1947
ISBN: 0140187383
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1947
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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