A contrarian tale that revels in outmoded notions of masculinity and professional success.
In this debut novel, a New York adman grows tired of the fast life and dreams of escape.
Billy Boyd Salinger is a junior account executive at a Manhattan advertising agency. In the book’s opening pages, he receives a promotion to manage a new account with the makers of E-Z Lax, a popular laxative. Billy experiences another life change when he moves into his friend Addison’s apartment, a penthouse owned by his pal’s father. Addison likes drugs, booze, and sex, and so does Billy. Addison is a hard partier, a daddy’s boy, a casual racist, and a lech. Billy’s no better. He’s superficial and brand- and status-obsessed. When he hits on a 16-year-old, he defends himself by observing that the girl “looks buxom enough to be twenty-six.” While listening to a female co-worker, he imagines sticking his “tongue down her throat.” But the colleague, who looks like a model and is coincidentally named Kate Moss, asks him out. Later, when Billy sleeps with his friend Lorraine, a former model, the scene ends with his observation: “I squirt my load and am ravenous.” These episodes are pornographic and violent, with acts done “savagely.” Wilson’s writing is at its best when Billy assesses an expensive object, like Addison’s TV, a “Sony 70-inch Qualia 006 High Definition Television,” or one of the penthouse’s beds, a “hand-carved baroque sleigh bed.” These details do double duty, filling the novel with specificity and revealing Billy’s obsession with material goods. Along the way, the author tries to present Billy as a good guy. But the tale delights in the protagonist’s sexual escapades and eagerly celebrates the behavior of chauvinists. Billy never gets his comeuppance. In addition, the sloppy prose does the book no favors. It’s full of redundant lists, heaps of digressive information, inconsistencies (“craigslist.com” and “Craig’s list”; “E-Z Lax” and “EZ-LAX”), and the occasional malapropism: “I step off the elevator and am immediately impounded by loud music.”
A contrarian tale that revels in outmoded notions of masculinity and professional success.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5488-9231-9
Page Count: 374
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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