An impressive debut that, though it drags a bit in the middle, establishes a constant and ingeniously engrossing sense of...
A teenage girl and her Iranian lover, 17 years her senior, embark on a disturbing journey into the American Midwest.
Working as a candy striper in The Dalles Community Hospital in Oregon, 15-year-old Erika Etulain meets Dr. Majij Aziz, a repressed, bullied man from Iran in his early 30s. Compared to the boys in her tiresome junior high school, his maturity enchants her. Rebelling against staunch English parents, Erika rushes into the Iranian doctor’s arms, embarking with him on a road trip to Kansas, entering into sigheh, a temporary Shia marriage, so Majij can have sex with her guiltlessly. The cracks in this taboo coupling are immediate. Majij’s hope to shape Erika into the perfect Muslim wife whom he could take back to Iran is dashed by her rebellious spirit and inquisitive nature, to which he often violently reacts. Waiting for them in Topeka is Majij’s brother Hakim, whose devout fundamentalism demands much of his weak-willed sibling and his new wife. Hutson’s debut will predictably draw comparisons to Lolita, but the novel demonstrates a subtlety of tone and a skillful understanding of interpersonal relationships more reminiscent of Jane Austen than Vladimir Nabokov. The disquieting nature of their coupling is never romanticized, lending the narrative a clever, subdued quality so that otherwise banal happenings—a fart by Majij, an immature, sniping teenage comment from Erika—disturb not only the characters but the reader as well. The drawback to this approach is that the novel’s most important moments and its settings feel overly restrained, even generalized, in their portrayals, blunting emotional or violent outbursts by the characters and ironically making the novel feel its most inert when on the road. Though set before the events of 9/11, and never once uttering the word “terrorism,” the book draws heavily on real-world happenings in 1989, from the influence of the ayatollah to the first World Trade Center bombings, fostering a timely paranoia that addresses, if only superficially, both Islamophobia and fundamentalist Muslims’ fear of Western influences.
An impressive debut that, though it drags a bit in the middle, establishes a constant and ingeniously engrossing sense of discomfort.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-615-80963-2
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Gilliss Books
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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