Eight disturbing, elegant tales that plumb the obsessive powers of the imagination. Graham, author of one previous collection (The Art of the Knock, 1984) and a novel (How to Read an Unwritten Language, 1995), demonstrates an uncanny ability to trace the ways in which fear and confusion short-circuit our lives. In ``Geology,'' a young woman, married to a fossil-obsessed geologist, at first happily embraces his view of the world as ``a vast collection of secrets'' and of life (which she had previously found to be marked by a ``dry sameness and stillness'') as a process of constant change, a dizzying progression of moments. But her peripatetic husband and imminent motherhood add an increasing edge of anxiety to the vision, until her image of human life as a swift, uncontrolled passage and change as all-powerful begin to block out everything else. Her descent into madness is powerful, unsettling, and convincing. In ``The Pose,'' a middle-aged woman, desperate to arouse her taciturn, invention-obsessed husband, uses one of her mate's odder ideas, an ``all-purpose'' clothes hanger in the shape of a human body, to attempt to reach him by re-creating an image of herself as a young, desirable woman. The sharp, droll ``The Reverse'' traces the way in which the commercials she films (parodies of the frantic, uncontrolled life of a housewife) begin to color and then (both wittily and savagely) to unhinge a young actress's view of her life. ``Lucky'' charts the growing obsession of an aging salesman with the declining health of his clientele; as they sicken and die off, he finds himself uncontrollably drawn to a volume detailing human anatomy and the indignities worked on it by illness and age. ``Angel'' follows a young boy, suddenly orphaned, as he becomes obsessed with the conviction that an angel shadows every moment of his life. Unique, somber terrain, precisely charted by a writer in absolute control of his material.
Pub Date: Dec. 3, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80372-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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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