The scenes between the lovers are touching, if a tad predictable, but it’s Burke’s evocation of a murky world, where savior...
A paramedic/photographer falls in love with an AIDS patient in a debut notable for its gritty realism.
They may not have the status of cops and firemen, but paramedics are on the front line, too. The job was worse in New York during the early 1990s, when crime was rampant and the city was being hit hard by the AIDS/crack epidemics. Frank Verbeckas, not long out of college, is a medic at Harlem hospital. He has become a connoisseur of the macabre, whipping out his camera to shoot the dead or damaged before loading them onto the ambulance with his partner Burnette, an obnoxious loudmouth. Frank may sound sick and creepy, but don’t rush to judgment: He is a mass of contradictions (and a fine photographer). His own trauma came when, after nursing his father through a long illness, he found him dead in the bathtub, a suicide. Spiraling into severe depression, Frank became a medic to cauterize the wound. Called to minister to another suicide, this one an AIDS patient, Frank meets Emily, who is also HIV-positive, and the two start dating (Frank uses condoms). Burke cross-cuts between their awkward courtship, which blossoms into a doomed love, and Frank’s on-the-job trials. The medics, led by the enigmatic Gil Hook, steal drugs from the hospital as a sideline, while guys with guns stand guard. Frank participates, but he’s too weird to be one of the boys. Burke’s pitch-perfect dialogue and feel for male camaraderie give these scenes an electric charge. Looming in the background is one of the surgeons, Frank’s abrasive brother Norman, furious about the thefts but unwilling to snitch. As Emily’s T-cell count drops precipitously, Frank quits; he has already seen one corpse too many.
The scenes between the lovers are touching, if a tad predictable, but it’s Burke’s evocation of a murky world, where savior and sinner come in one macho package, that makes this an exhilarating standout.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6201-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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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