Ten generally engaging stories from Midwestern writer Rindo (Suburban Metaphysics, 1990), cleverly satirizing the truths and illusions we hold dear while portraying individual Americans with compassion and humor. In the tragic yet hilarious ``The Blue Heron,'' an unhinged widower collects exotic pets and winds up with 37, plus one blue heron. His son finally calls in the animal welfare people, but realizes, when his father locks himself indoors and shoots at the raiders' cars, that the old man has become ``Noah the terrorist in his land-locked ark,'' all in the name of lost love. The ironic ``Ten Things I've Heard That I Believe'' shows a college professor of American folklore becoming a legend himself by confessing in class that he has cancer, shacking up with three women students, and wearing a bandanna to hide the effects of chemotherapy and an earring ``to complete the look.'' When you have cancer you can do anything, he reasons, yet discovers his that ``lifetime of scrupulous observation'' hasn't prepared him for death. One of Rindo's funniest tales, ``Taxidermy and Infidelities,'' involves a son and father who meet for a reconciliatory picnic at their mother/wife's grave on the eve of Dad's fifth marriage. Though angry at his irresponsible behavior towards his children, the son comes to marvel at his passionate love of life, most memorably expressed in his relationship with wife number four, a taxidermist who ravished him while he was strapped naked to the roof of a car. Some stories, like ``Aliens,'' reflect the author's ability to handle a variety of narrative voices. Others, including ``Women in the Woods,'' provide suspense but end on frustratingly ambiguous notes. Nevertheless, Rindo has a knack for describing the absurd details that give lives meaning. Freakish, darkly comic, and utterly contemporary.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-89823-163-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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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