A novel that exhibits flashes of rich humor and intelligence, yet never gels.
An interstate odyssey chronicling a brazen hero on a journey both scatological and transcendent.
When he comes home one day, Aaron Abrams finds his brother and wife making love in his pool. He dumps a bucket of cold water on their hot scene in protest, and thus the hero’s journey begins. Immediately packing his life into his car, he heads to New York and the big book-publishing deal he’s just scored. One of the first things we learn about Aaron is his obsession with Newman’s Own lemonade, a detail that Moffie (The Organ Grinder and the Monkey, 2008, etc.) is so charmed by that he never lets readers forget it. These initially funny quirks and some uneasily episodic encounters work overtime to sustain the protracted account of Aaron’s avoidance of his family’s dissolution. After a meeting with his hot lesbian agent, she throws him an assistant so taken by his writing that an immediate bedroom session ensues. Indeed Aaron experiences so many lurid sexual encounters during his sojourn that an Ian Fleming novel seems modest by comparison. In fact, so little attention is given to the central betrayal that Aaron and his world never properly take shape. Aaron travels cross-country gathering inspiration for his next masterpiece, but nowhere in his dialogue is it evident that he writes serious books for a living. Full of self-reverential references, jokes and conversations meant to flatter the hero or plug pop-culture favorites, the central story is often left in the dust–and Moffie’s intelligence and wit, which are on display, can’t make up for it. There are some memorable moments, but there is no settlement between story or attitude, and this vacillation dilutes both. Aaron’s unexpected battle with hemorrhoids makes for some painfully funny and frank passages, but just as he becomes human, he slips back into cipherhood, leaving him only to function as wish-fulfillment. The moods are admirably varied, but the book ends with a flavor so inappropriately saccharine that it’s not the completion of a full portrait of a man, just the symptom of a story without limits.
A novel that exhibits flashes of rich humor and intelligence, yet never gels.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-0461-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
