Two novellas that, though more subdued than Ingalls's last collection (The End of Tragedy, 1989), show her as adept as ever at mixing the sinister and the commonplace to create psychological suspense. In Sis and Bud, Alma and Bruce are enjoying an ordinary American childhood, secure in the love of their decent if fuddy- duddy parents, Elton and Bess. When the kids turn 14, the parents tell them that they're adopted. Bruce is horrified, and determined to make his biological parents pay for their betrayal; but Alma is pleased, feeling free to love her dear brother in a new way (Bruce will have none of it). Time goes by. Bruce leaves his home, somewhere in the East, and tracks his birth mother to Kentucky. There, mother Joanna has a prosperous marriage and two grown daughters who Bruce (having ingratiated himself with the family) decides are ``too shallow to be hurt''; Joanna is his target. A climax involving incest and murder also reveals that Joanna wanted to pay back her own parents for their victimization of her; like mother, like son. In the title story, working-girl Sandra is a different kind of victim—not the captive of her genes but of romantic illusion. About to dump her insensitive boyfriend Bert, she is fair game for the first man who'll show her attention; and Roy Martinson seems like the perfect stranger, even if he's rumored to have killed his first wife and is the father of the exceedingly creepy Eric, who cut open his pet hamster ``to see what was inside.'' Roy proposes on their second date, and Sandra accepts, sustained by blind faith; but will it save her from these two operators? What's lacking here is the wildly inventive quality of Ingalls's best work—but, still, this is solid entertainment.
Pub Date: June 8, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-41300-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1992
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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