The author of Life Estates (1994), among other portraits of women struggling through a Sargasso of ego-entanglements, here tracks a marriage splintering in an agony of deep grief after the death of a beloved daughter. ``A lot of wishes and feelings lay buried in a person, then something like this tragedy comes along and uncovers them.'' So declares Douglas, sorrowful husband of Nan, who narrates here. The accidental death of their 22-year-old daughter Bethany, and then the gift of her heart to prolong the life of a frail Texas preacher, does indeed blast apart the secure ``compromises'' of the 25-year-old marriage, releasing fevered resentments, other griefs, old rage. Nan, who cut short her academic career in paleontology, chaffs against her husband's (deserved, she knows) success as a ``brain scientist.'' She thrashes against the confines of her marriage, her untended desires, her increasingly strange life- -symbolized for her by Syracuse, the wintry city in upstate New York where she now lives, as opposed to the warm breadth of her native Texas. Nan will absorb herself in fossil hunting, while Douglas drifts toward an affair (does he resurrect a desire to have more babies? a ``replacement'' for Bethany?), and becomes obsessed with the man who has his daughter's heart as if ``she still was.'' Healing will take place as Douglas confronts an old savage grief and recovers a closeness to their son. And Nan, turning back from her escape into science, confronts her grief when she watches a transplant operation and witnesses a miracle. A stimulating read, crammed with thorny themes and scientific marvels: fossil ``footprints'' billions of years old; the fluttering of a living heart; underwater creatures rich and strange. Hearon skimps on character—Douglas and Nan are at times reduced by the novel's weighty concerns to lecturing, hectoring shells—but even so this is a bright, involving work, if more somber than Hearon's others.
Pub Date: March 21, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44641-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
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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