A flawed tale, despite some cutting observations of the writerly demeanor.
An author bathing in the glory of publishing his debut novel heads to New York for his first book signing.
Simon Burchwood considers himself to be a writer at the pinnacle of his art. He believes that he has achieved recognition and fame, which, for him, are the most important accolades a man in his profession could think to achieve. Semegran’s (The Discarded Feast, 2017, etc.) novel opens with a boast: “I have become wildly more successful than I ever could have dreamed.” Simon is keen to share this assertion, and does so with everyone he meets. The truth is Simon appears to be a small-time author with a massively overinflated sense of self-importance who is on the cusp of publishing his first novel. The story charts his journey to New York, where he is to give a reading at a flagship bookstore, but first he will pay a visit to his hometown of Montgomery, Alabama, in a bid to catch up with his childhood friend Jason. Seeing the streets where he grew up stirs up a cocktail of emotions, from mawkishness to disgust. Simon encounters his childhood sweetheart working in a strip joint, and realizes he still bears a resentment toward the kid who stole his prized Spider-Man comic. Yet he also knows that as a writer he is above small-town life, heading to New York with Jason, despite the fact he views him disparagingly as a “goddamn pig.” In Simon, the author has created a psychologically complex character that is difficult to like or tolerate. Written in the first person, Simon’s narrative is consistently abrasive and repetitive: “I gobbled up my second omelet as quickly as the first, and found myself licking my goddamn fingers and smacking my goddamn lips and scraping the edge of my goddamn plate with my fork like a goddamn heathen.” Semegran seems to channel Charles Bukowski’s muscular style but delivers a tired, ersatz version. Ironic or not, it becomes wearing after several pages. Nevertheless, the close-to-the-bone novel captures perfectly the intensely solipsistic nature of a certain type of author—one who arrogantly lauds the importance of his craft over others, yet ultimately favors public adoration over creative endeavor. But a clever and surprising twist fails to rescue what is often a tiresome read.
A flawed tale, despite some cutting observations of the writerly demeanor.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-615-75335-5
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Mutt Press
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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