Rough start but finally builds into an engaging debut.
First novel from a new press that focuses on original literary paperbacks (see Grimes, above). This tyro’s effort, however, is far less of a treasure than Grimes’s psychopharmacological whiz.
Back in the mid-’90s, Martin Sierra, an unpublished young Spanish/American writer abandoned by his poetess mother in childhood, now rooms in Brooklyn but is a habitué of Alphabet City clubs on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He may well have a collection of rejection slips heavier than the Sunday New York Times. His latest poems have come back with a mustard smear and not even the courtesy of a rejection slip. Martin cruises clubs looking for girls, but he even gets turned down by hookers in automobiles. Drinks quite a bit. Best bud is Nikki, a lesbian dreamboat who may neck with him at ear-banging clubs but who won’t let him on board. The clubs rave with freak scenes, and from the Useless-Nameless band a transvestite entertainer in emerald wig and wrapped only in Saran Wrap sings to trendies, B-list models, groovers high on X, eccentrics, and fashion victims. And Nikki dances with Martin, letting it all hang out! She’s just priceless! Sweet heaven! And on Second Street at 3 p.m., wild-assed kids with assorted mental problems mix with homeless crackheads. A Japanese firm’s Air Shipping clerk, Marty self-publishes his first book, Idealism and Early Wish-fulfillment, and spends six months hustling it on St. Marks Place, selling sixty copies. He also follows The Village Voice personals closely, has his own ad in the back, writes long letters to women who answer. He’s supposed to meet Lola in front of Kim’s Video on St. Marks Place. Is she this petite goth girl, clutching a bouquet of barbed wire, mincing past? Body-pierced Lola’s an art student who paints hyper-real scenes of intense psychopathic violence. Then comes Amaris, who, unbuckling him, says, “Hurry up, you sexist prick.”
Rough start but finally builds into an engaging debut.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-9713415-9-1
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Ludlow Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
