This book’s portrayal of childhood exuberance and petulance, vivid characters, and Eddie’s ephemeral sense of melancholy...
Young Eddie Steinberg, growing up in 1950s Corvallis, Oregon, visits his maternal grandparents in Los Angeles in this child’s-eye view of the world of adults.
Malamud’s (Old Poems, New Translations: Two Books of Verse, 2013) novel focuses on Eddie’s California visit to his beloved “Granny.” It’s an evocative portrayal of a young boy passionately entranced by sunny California and on the brink of comprehending the complexities of human interactions. The author’s chapterlong depiction of the three-day journey by train from Corvallis to Los Angeles captures young Eddie’s visceral sense of excitement and wonder as he’s lulled by the sound of the wheels on the tracks, the swaying of the cars, and the scenery rushing past his window. Eddie’s world exists in the moment, and the book is filled with meticulously written observations of details of ordinary life, allowing Malamud to turn a simple gas-station stop into an anecdote-worthy event: “He got back in the car. His grandfather got in. The drama of turning the key in the lock, the motor purring to life, the slow slide out of the gas station, with the smooth Buick full of luxurious gas.” Sometimes, the moments are filled with the magic of imaginative flights of fantasy, especially when Eddie is denied something he really wants: “He’d have a swimming pool, and fill it with ice cream and chocolate sauce. And everyone in the world would admire him for doing it.” The bulk of the novel takes place during the family’s 1958 excursion, during which Eddie spends three weeks alone with his grandparents. Two more annual summer visits follow, and each time Granny and Gramps, a voice instructor, rent a different house furnished with a different piano. The story then surges a bit jarringly forward, with the family moving East as Eddie’s father becomes a successful writer—think Bernard Malamud, the author’s late father—in a short catch-up that brings Eddie into his late 20s.
This book’s portrayal of childhood exuberance and petulance, vivid characters, and Eddie’s ephemeral sense of melancholy should keep readers hooked until the end.Pub Date: May 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5307-1042-3
Page Count: 204
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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