In 1973, a decaying suburban Connecticut family has a bad day. Father Benjamin Hood is a middle-aged alcoholic, tormented by canker sores, in danger of losing his job as a media and entertainment expert for a high-end brokerage house, and having an affair with a neighbor named Janey. His wife, Elena, is cold and distant, even though she gets a kick reading about impotence in Masters and Johnson and believes herself ``capable of abandon.'' Fourteen-year-old Wendy Hood's raging hormones and desire to break out lead to dry humping in basements and graveyards and a daring public display with a girlfriend at a slumber party. Older brother Paul, relegated to boarding school, gets stoned and compulsively follows the comic book capers of the Fantastic Four. On this fateful day, Janey disappears in the middle of her afternoon rendezvous with Benjamin to do some shopping; Benjamin catches Wendy and Janey's son Mike going at it; Elena confronts Benjamin about his infidelity; Benjamin and Elena find themselves at a neighborhood key party (a '60s tradition that migrated belatedly to suburbia whereby men toss their keys in a bowl at the beginning of the night and at the end of the night the women randomly select a set and go off with its owner); Janey purposely shies away from the Hood key ring; Benjamin passes out on the bathroom floor; Elena goes off with Janey's husband; Wendy wanders over to Mike's house and seduces his younger brother Sandy because Mike isn't around; Paul makes an unsuccessful play for the woman of his dreams with alcohol and drugs; and matters only get worse because a vicious northeaster rages outside. Moody (Garden State, 1992) masterfully captures suburban angst through lucid detail. But his characters lack substance so that we don't care what happens to them, and in the end, it seems, neither do they. Too cold.
Pub Date: May 4, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-57921-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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