Another sensitive examination of universal emotions in the hearts of affluent WASPs from Robinson, in a novel that depicts a second marriage imperiled by offspring from the first. When Emma Goodwin and Peter Chatfield fall in love in 1984, both are recently divorced and feeling guilty because they initiated the break-ups. Emma’s ex-husband, Warren (the book’s only crudely drawn portrait), is a manipulative brute who uses their three-year-old daughter, Tess, as a weapon; social-climbing Caroline Chatfield, devastated by Peter’s departure, feels a vindictiveness toward him that only exacerbates seven-year-old Amanda’s sullenness and rage. When Peter and Emma marry, it’s clear that the stage is set for disaster, though the grim denouement takes eight years to arrive. As in her short fiction (Asking for Love, 1996, etc.), Robinson expertly delineates complex interactions among people, charting the ebb and flow of passions, the revision of opinions as her characters learn and mature. There are no villains (not even Warren), just fallible human beings whose mistakes sometimes have permanent consequences. Amanda’s behavior worsens as she enters her teens, and Peter’s misguided attempts to force her to be part of his new family only deepen her alienation; and well-intentioned Emma, rejected over and over again, finds her marriage battered by her inability to love her stepdaughter. This unhappy impasse is shattered by an automobile accident that shocks all the protagonists out of their frozen attitudes. Robinson’s carefully honed techniques aren’t quite as effective here as in her stories; instead of a few key epiphanies that illuminate a short text, she loads her full-length narrative with so many instances of the characters musing on their relationships and their feelings that the insights occasionally seem obvious and excessive. These flaws, though, are transcended in the moving final chapters, which show people we care about groping toward reconciliation and renewal. A thoughtful, tender tale by one of our finest exponents of traditional realistic fiction.
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-43901-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
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
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
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