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THE UNDERGROUND MAN

Name: THE UNDERGROUND MAN
Author: Mick Jackson
ISBN: 0-688-15449-2

by Mick Jackson ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1997

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An ingenious, sympathetic (though somewhat claustrophobic) fictional exploration of the odd life and peculiar obsessions of William John Cavendish-Bentinck-Scott, the fifth Duke of Portland (180079), and one of the great Victorian eccentrics. Jackson's debut novel takes some of what is known of the Duke's life, in addition to folktales about him that still circulate in his native Nottinghamshire, and adds a considerable amount of invention to create the portrait of a bright, hopelessly baffled figure, struggling to carry out the hereditary obligations of his office while sinking deeper and deeper into a hypochondriacal frenzy. The exceedingly wealthy Duke is best remembered for having created a series of vast tunnels—each wide enough to allow a coach-and-four to pass through—leading to his home, to allow him to come and go without being watched by the neighbors. Jackson adds to that actual occurrence an obsession with health—and a desperate fear of the impermanence of life—that drive the Duke to ever wilder attempts to regain well-being. He besieges a number of doctors, convinced that he is exhibiting hideous symptoms of illness and decay, and visits a variety of healers, including spiritualist sisters and a ``bone manipulator.'' All of this is narrated in the first person, as the Duke sets down in his journal a running commentary on the state of his body and on his confusing encounters with the world. There's much here that is sharp and winning: Jackson's re-creation of the Duke's voice- -querulous and exact—and of the voices of his many baffled, indulgent retainers. His portrait, through the Duke's eyes, of an age poised between credulity and science is shrewd and fascinating. But a little of the Duke goes a long way. Jackson's excavation of a damaged, self-absorbed figure finally becomes somewhat wearying. Still, there's enough vigor and imagination here to suggest the emergence of a lively new talent.

Pub Date: June 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-688-15449-2

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.