Following a hiatus of more than 15 years, in which Marius wrote the acclaimed biography Thomas More (1984), he returns to fiction with a moving vision of race, religion, and progress in the Tennessee back-country during WW I and the 1920's. Worldly Paul Alexander arrives in remote Bourbonville to take a position as chemist for the local rail-car foundry, after having been severely wounded in battle while serving in the Belgian infantry. As a foreigner he immediately becomes an object of gossip and curiosity, as well as the center of deepening controversy when powerful rivals in town seek to win him over. A sensitive man of few words, he has to cope not only with ignorance and xenophobia but also with the shadows of his past—the comforting ghosts of his two best friends, killed in action beside him, and the family tragedy that swept him from a comfortable childhood in Greece to war-torn Belgium. He balances the respect of his domineering boss, Moreland Pinkerton, with the friendship of the powerful Ledbetter clan, who resent Pinkerton's disruption of traditional ways as he transformed the local swamp into his foundry, until the actions of a proud, well-informed, and black ex-soldier ignite a powder keg: a Klan lynching, a bloody strike, and Pinkerton's murder. Alexander is tapped to replace his boss and fully intends to leave soon, but marriage, a child, and a growing sense of belonging as years pass quietly mold him into a respected, permanent resident. An unusual, compelling immigrant's tale, vibrant in mingling present and past and redolent with personal and social history; the dramatic peaks are masterful and memorable, even if the fires burn low in the end.
Pub Date: May 21, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-58322-1
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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