A loosely woven series of coming-of-age tales set in 1960s America.
In this collection, Herron (One Way Street, 2014, etc.) tackles big themes: mental illness, war, loyalty, abuse, friendship and family. Readers might easily get lost in such broad terrain, but Herron keeps them tethered by a unifying question: How are memories constrained by perspective? In his foreword, Herron describes the book as both anthology and novel; chapters share characters and settings but offer original details and points of view. The first is in small-town America, 1962. Paul, a teenager, watches a new family move into the house across from his on Reichold Street, and he confronts Albert, who looks like a bully, for the first time. Over the next few years, Albert’s stepfather, Carl, terrorizes his family and the neighborhood with drunken abuse as Paul tries to help and Albert rebels. Readers learn to hate Carl while losing hope for Albert. Subsequent chapters, told by Carl, Albert, their family members and other kids on Reichold Street, add layers to these events. Carl’s chapter, seen through his confusion, medication and booze, offers a frightening yet compassionate view of mental illness and its stigma, especially in the ’60s. These opening chapters are the strongest in the collection; the characters are bold, the plot twists surprising, and the point—that we never fully know a person or his or her story—heartbreakingly clear. The middle sections, related by minor characters, add little to the overall narrative; some read as filler, although one, told by a Reichold Street kid lured by organized crime, makes a fine stand-alone story. Toward the end of the book, Herron returns to Albert, his two tours in Vietnam and the pall of that war over American youth. Through flashbacks to Reichold Street, readers further witness Carl’s lifelong, devastating influence on Albert; an additional chapter from Carl’s perspective would nicely round out the book.
Skillfully written and emotionally charged.
Pub Date: March 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475106237
Page Count: 292
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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