Wearying fluff.
News flash: Many men are afraid of commitment.
David, the protagonist of the second novel by Mebus (Booty Nomad, 2004), is a young Manhattanite whose ambition is surpassed only by his shallow self-regard. He jettisoned a lucrative career in TV production to concentrate on his novel, which is inspired by his last breakup, and he bemoans the fact that his friends are doing crazy stuff like hooking up and settling down. (Clearly they ought to be living a lifestyle more like his, which involves collecting rejection letters, occupying a shoebox apartment and being barely competent at his weekend job as a wedding deejay.) David adores his tribe for being “sarcastic, overly intellectual, competitive smart-asses,” so he’s pained by the transformation of his friend Annie, who’s engaged to a decent fellow David takes to calling Rat Boy. He dubs another friend’s girlfriend Donkey Girl, and pretty quickly it’s clear that anybody who enjoys conjuring up infantile nicknames for his friends’ significant others is the guy with the problem. But though Mebus acknowledges that David could stand to grow up a little, he’s oddly confident that this egotistical, emotionally stunted fool is some kind of hero. The snark just keeps on coming, with David stubbornly cracking wise about his quirky (but less-brilliant) friends and family members. His love interest is a woman named Janey who waitresses at many of the weddings at which David deejays, and she’s interested in getting into TV production and—well, enough about Janey, what about David’s needs? The plot centers less on any would-be romance than on David’s efforts to wreck the relationship between Annie and Rat Boy with the help of Zach, who’s a stereotype twofer (trust-fund brat; promiscuous gay man). David eventually reaches the stunning conclusion that maybe, just maybe, people are allowed to make choices others may disagree with; most people could figure that out without being fed 300-plus pages of bad jokes.
Wearying fluff.Pub Date: June 21, 2006
ISBN: 1-4013-5256-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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