The author’s delicate touch captures the head if not the heart of this meditation on loyalty, friendship, and the geometry...
A lifelong friendship turns more complicated and murky when the disappearance of one of the women leads to unwelcome discoveries and a reconfiguration.
Passions supposedly run high in Brackenbury’s (The Lost Love Letters of Henri Fournier, 2018, etc.) latest novel—there's the sexual intensity of a long love affair; the decision to risk everything for a career in filmmaking; jealousy and competitiveness between women friends. And yet little of this fire ignites the pages of what is a steady, cool, thoughtful novel charting the relationship between Hannah Farrell and Claudia Prescott across the decades. The pair bonded at an English boarding school and remained BFFs through the college years at Cambridge and beyond. A trip to Europe during which they met Alexandre, an attractive student, did set up some tension between the women, but Hannah, the more mysterious of the two, solved the dilemma by walking away, leaving Alexandre to Claudia. Despite other occasional disappearances later in life, Hannah opted for a traditional track as wife to Philip and mother to twins. Claudia, however, struck out for California to try her hand as a moviemaker before eventually settling as a teacher of film studies at a college in Virginia, with Alexandre as her distant, occasional, yet lifelong lover. The two women stayed in touch and visited annually, but now Hannah has failed to show up as expected at the family holiday home, and Claudia is summoned by Philip. When Hannah does reappear, the not entirely unpredictable pieces of the story fall neatly into place. A final episode imports its own inherent intensity, yet it is in the small gestures that the story achieves some resonance.
The author’s delicate touch captures the head if not the heart of this meditation on loyalty, friendship, and the geometry of human interconnection.Pub Date: July 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-88328579-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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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