Bowen's 11th distaff western delivers a lingering sadness for a fascinating era that, for all its monstrous cruelties, ended...
The fourth in the madcap, picaresque series about Wild West rapscallion Luther "Yellowstone" Kelly has the wily scout ricocheting among rival paleontologists, a homicidal Indian, and an amorous tough-gal artist.
Having lost his Indian bride in Kelly Blue (1991), Kelly joins drunken spectators at the 1869 driving of the golden spike linking the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads. He has nothing more on his mind than a few hours of soused oblivion in Pignuts's saloon when the historical paleontologist Jonathon Cope blows in and asks whether Kelly has heard of Charles Darwin. "A British feller pissed all over the Bible," Kelly replies. That's enough to get him hired to take the fabulously wealthy Cope through the wilds of Wyoming in search of the fossil of Eohippus, or Dawn Horse, the mustang's prehistoric three-toed ancestor. Speed is of the essence, Cope insists, because his dreaded rival Othniel Marsh is also hunting. What Cope doesn't know is that his illustrator, the beautiful, wealthy, sophisticated, and miraculously sharpshooting Alys de Bonneterre (she puts bullet holes in Pignuts's ears when he tries to sell her a box of miscellaneous bones as the last remains of her dead brother), wants to beat both Cope and Marsh at their own game. Alys falls hard for Kelly, who finds himself cleaned up, well-clothed, married and riding back east on Alys's private rail car, pursued by Blue Fox, a Dartmouth-educated Cheyenne who intends to torture and kill as many white men as possible. Bowen's herky-jerky plot drags the reluctant Kelly to encounters with other historical figures, such as Red Cloud, Washakie, Buffalo Bill Cody, Brigham Young, and Ulysses S. Grant, against a coldly beautiful landscape where violence and death occur without warning.
Bowen's 11th distaff western delivers a lingering sadness for a fascinating era that, for all its monstrous cruelties, ended much too soon.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-24106-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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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