Glimpses of the Montana landscape lift a gloomy narrative.
Two friends in their early 70s share the joys and pains of growing old in backwoods Montana in this novel.
When they were in their 20s, Ida and Martha spent time together in a commune in Kansas. After becoming close friends, they drifted apart, each to lead starkly different lives—“like the country mouse and the city mouse,” as Martha remarks. Ida put down roots in Boulder, Colorado, working in an oncology ward and developing a hospice program, and Martha devoted herself to raising horses. When Martha learns that Ida’s husband has died, the two friends reconnect, resulting in Ida’s decision to join Martha in rugged Montana. Ida helps out at the family guest ranch, which is run by Annie, Martha’s daughter (“The ranch nestled between two mountain ranges in Big Sky country—the Gallatins to the east and the Madisons on the west. In the distance, a curtain of Douglas firs edged the perimeter of the ranch, indicating where the foothills began their ascent”). Ida and Martha live together in the nearby cottage, where they have protracted conversations about friendship, love, aging, and death. But the course of Ida’s life changes once again when an unexpected romance flourishes. Fretz-Goering (Simple Life Fretz, 2016) is an eloquent writer who captures Montana’s wild beauty with elegance and alacrity: “The snow layers were light and powdery this early in the season….A gibbous moon hung low in the sky, balancing atop a mountain peak.” But the author’s handling of dialogue is less impressive; it is stiff and unnatural. When discussing grief, Ida comments: “You know how grief is. Finds a place to settle down deep in your soul and then saunters back at inauspicious times.” The message is sincere, but the wording is more akin to a self-help guide than casual conversation. Ida and Martha’s chats feel as though they have been contrived by the author to excavate weighty topics, but they lack the flow, spontaneity, and informality of an intimate tête-à-tête between friends. The novel is also peppered with tragedy, bad news, and sadness. In this respect, it accepts and bravely faces the uncertainties of life, particularly in old age, but many readers will likely struggle with its pervasive melancholia.
Glimpses of the Montana landscape lift a gloomy narrative.Pub Date: June 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5255-2389-2
Page Count: 444
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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