Although Bausch (Rebel Powers, 1993, etc.) occasionally rests on his laurels here, this collection (some stories appeared previously in Harper's and other magazines) supports his reputation as a masterful short-fiction writer who fearlessly addresses love and its many permutations. One of Bausch's greatest talents is his ear for dialogue, and he has a way of replicating its rhythms while pointing up the ridiculousness of daily communication. ``Aren't You Happy For Me?'' consists mostly of a telephone call between a 23-year-old daughter and her father as she announces that she is getting married, that she is pregnant, and that her fiancÇ is 63. The discovery of a single ``High-Heeled Shoe'' in a field causes a man to contemplate the first and only affair during his 25-year marriage, and in speaking to his wife he is never quite sure whether he has revealed his secret. ``Tandolfo the Great'' is a part-time clown who drives to perform at a birthday party with a wedding cake in the back of his car, having intended to use it to propose marriage only to discover that the woman he secretly loves has reconciled with a former boyfriend. He takes out his sadness on the birthday boy and is tossed out of the party, almost losing his rabbit in the process. The title novella is a finely nuanced look at the aftermath of a suicide. A woman and her husband are forced to sell their farm, and before moving day she goes to a motel and swallows a bottle of pills without leaving a note. The narrative peels back layers and reveals shards of information about her and her family- -she had almost left her husband for another man 15 years earlier; her daughter Maizie has come tantalizingly close to an affair with a co-worker—and deals with the big question by letting it hang unanswered. Pauses and crossed signals that echo loudly.
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-395-64493-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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