Prose pretty much stripped of graces remains useful for this unpretentious, involving story told with unfaltering authority.
A heartfelt debut in which a Montana ranch family battles both Mother Nature and human nature.
It’s punishing country, southeastern Montana: choking dust-storms, killer droughts, merciless winters, and a population that puts on pessimism like an extra layer of clothing. Sensing he’s in danger of becoming typical, young Blake Arbuckle fights against it, wants something better for himself but has no real idea what it might be. The time is the early part of the 20th century, and when we meet the Arbuckles (loosely based on the author's grandparents) they’re attempting to cope with the tragic drowning of Blake’s older brother George. But it’s worse than that. The excruciating thing, the thing that brings despair chillingly close, is the growing sense among the family that the death might not have been accidental. Jack, the oldest brother, who was with George when he died, is undeniably shaken by what happened, by whatever it was that happened, but enigmatic Jack is hard to read. And it’s a given that there was little love lost between the two brothers. With everything still unresolved, Jack suddenly disappears—without explanation. And then, months later, just as suddenly, he reappears. He’d enlisted in the AEF, he tells the bewildered Arbuckles, been shipped overseas to France, wounded there, and now, a civilian again, has a brand-new wife he wants the family to meet. Rita is sweet-natured and pretty, and the Arbuckles are warmly welcoming. As for Blake, he’s overwhelmed, “engulfed” by her. For unsophisticated, bone-loyal Blake—a portrait rendered with particular sympathy—that simply means he’s hers forever. All the portraits are convincingly drawn: the silent, drudgery-shaped father, the indomitable mother, the often contentious brothers—Blake aside—and, most vividly, the bleak, cruel land, making incessant and impossible demands on those who love it despite themselves.
Prose pretty much stripped of graces remains useful for this unpretentious, involving story told with unfaltering authority.Pub Date: June 7, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-008434-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping...
When the newly elected Vice President’s life is threatened, the Secret Service runs to nomadic soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher (Echo Burning, 2001, etc.) in this razor-sharp update of The Day of the Jackal and In the Line of Fire that’s begging to be filmed.
Why Reacher? Because M.E. Froelich, head of the VP’s protection team, was once a colleague and lover of his late brother Joe, who’d impressed her with tales of Jack’s derring-do as an Army MP. Now Froelich and her Brooks Brothers–tailored boss Stuyvesant have been receiving a series of anonymous messages threatening the life of North Dakota Senator/Vice President–elect Brook Armstrong. Since the threats may be coming from within the Secret Service’s own ranks—if they aren’t, it’s hard to see how they’ve been getting delivered—they can’t afford an internal investigation. Hence the call to Reacher, who wastes no time in hooking up with his old friend Frances Neagley, another Army vet turned private eye, first to see whether he can figure out a way to assassinate Armstrong, then to head off whoever else is trying. It’s Reacher’s matter-of-fact gift to think of everything, from the most likely position a sniper would assume at Armstrong’s Thanksgiving visit to a homeless shelter to the telltale punctuation of one of the threats, and to pluck helpers from the tiny cast who can fill the remaining gaps because they aren’t idiots or stooges. And it’s Child’s gift to keep tightening the screws, even when nothing’s happening except the arrival of a series of unsigned letters, and to convey a sense of the blank impossibility of guarding any public figure from danger day after highly exposed day, and the dedication and heroism of the agents who take on this daunting job.
Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping himself these days.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14861-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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