In this dark and unfunny novel, Bradfield (Dream of the Wolf, 1990, etc.) writes the ``memoirs'' of a pathetic old woman who tries to gain control of her life by killing her mean and domineering husband. Unfortunately for Emma O'Hallahan, who has already committed the murderous act when the book begins, the cost of her freedom seems to be her sanity, which gradually slips away during the writing of her autobiography. What's the use of shooting your husband with a shotgun and burying him in the backyard, for example, if he keeps on appearing in the house—in various states of decomposition—and treating you as abusively as he did when he was alive? No matter how many stakes and bullets Emma puts in him, Marvin will not stay put. In addition to the annoying ghost, Emma also has her snooping neighbor, Mrs. Stansfield, to contend with—or dispose of. The freshly turned mounds of earth in the backyard multiply, until one day Emma counts four: She knows one is Marvin, one is Mrs. Stansfield, and one is the money from her and Marvin's joint bank account. But what's underneath the fourth? Emma is afraid she may have killed her grandson Teddy, who was coming to pay her a visit, or maybe her new boyfriend, whom she calls Mr. Sullivan (even in their most intimate moments) and was very anxious to get rid of the first time he came over for dinner. Although Emma fills her time by writing in her journal and entertaining the many guests—alive, dead, and imaginary—who arrive at her door, she is not fulfilled. She doesn't know how to end her memoirs or what to make of the newly dug fifth hole in the backyard. Could it be for Emma herself? An imaginative story, but after the initial shock wears off, the comedy dies and Emma becomes merely annoying.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11349-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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