Gummer has found rich territory for satire, but he never decides if his take should be wacky or more nuanced.
Suburban Little League fields become a metaphor for adult squabbles in this comic novel.
Ben, the hero of Gummer’s fiction debut, is an unlikely candidate for the role of inspirational coach of a Little League squad in suburban northern California. Unlike his late father, who guided plenty of young athletes in the town of Palace Valley, Ben extracted himself from baseball as a child and instead became a builder of fine furniture in New York City, where he lived with his wife, Jili, and three kids. But after Jili’s mother falls ill, the brood heads back west, and Ben has to confront dad’s legacy and the memory of teenage slights. Much of the book is structured around comic set pieces built around stereotypical characters: the alluring mom who may be trying to put Ben in a compromising position, the hotheaded Little League coach who runs his team like Patton and the star pitcher who’s full of attitude and disdain. Such archetypes would be more tolerable if the novel didn’t shift so erratically between sincerity and broad comedy. Ben has enough intellect and emotional depth to make him more than just a sputtering dolt when he’s left to take the reins of a team, and the back story of Ben and Jili’s efforts to keep their family together in the midst of a big move and a death in the family are well drawn. But though the novel initially seems to aspire to become a seriocomic study of suburbia in the mode of Tom Perrotta, it ultimately collapses into fluffier, family-movie fare. Unlikely, shticky predicaments abound, such as the appearance of a big-name pop star in Ben’s studio, and a subplot involving a shocking confession by a famous ballplayer goes nowhere. Worse, in Palace Valley, people nurse their high-school wounds to an absurd degree, which makes the climatic conflict between Ben and the bullying coach feel forced and cartoonish. The closing chapters hit plenty of feel-good buttons, but they’re too carefully machined to have much of an effect.
Gummer has found rich territory for satire, but he never decides if his take should be wacky or more nuanced.Pub Date: April 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-0917-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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