Inventing a do-nothing slob you can empathize with is a neat trick, but the story’s a bit too slovenly.
Death and misery stalk the antihero of Neilan’s comic debut—and that’s just at the crummy temp gig.
Shane knows a bar whose happy hour begins when most people are taking their first coffee break, but then he’s got the kind of life that’ll prompt a guy to start drinking at 10 a.m.: He’s fully convinced that his upstairs neighbor is carrying on an untoward relationship with his pet guinea pig; his landlord won’t be so pushy about the rent if he’ll sleep with his wife; and his sexual encounters with his girlfriend, Gwen, tend to feel a lot like professional wrestling matches. Oh, and he’s accused of murdering Marlene, a deaf dental hygienist who taught Shane to talk dirty in sign language. Neilan ultimately resolves Marlene’s death but not Shane’s bottomless hatred for himself and the world around him, and the funniest bits have him going metaphorically off the grid—the beer at a party tastes “like kiddie porn,” sex with the neighbor’s wife is “like an off-duty clown swinging two fish together by their tails.” If you can hang with Neilan’s taste in rude jokes and non sequiturs, there’s lots to like: Even if the humiliation of temp-slave life is well-trod ground for comedy writers, Shane’s abjection about alphabetizing files (and worse, his getting congratulated for his fine job of alphabetizing) gets some fresh laughs. But the occasional laugh-out-loud line doesn’t salvage a narrative that never quite jells. Shane’s regularly referenced tic of stealing salt shakers never becomes meaningful in terms of either plot or characterization, and the jokes get more leaden toward the end, as the author is forced to tie together the story’s multiple threads. More than a couple gags at the expense of the mentally retarded don’t do Neilan any favors, but Shane’s never pretended to be polite.
Inventing a do-nothing slob you can empathize with is a neat trick, but the story’s a bit too slovenly.Pub Date: May 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-35174-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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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