Flawed but intriguing work from an estimable novelist who keeps extending her range and never fails to surprise and engage.
Past and present, reality and dreams, harsh truths and dangerous delusions mingle intriguingly in this unusual fourth novel from the versatile author of vivid historical and contemporary fiction (The Mammoth Cheese, 2003, etc.).
In a fragmented set of narratives that move back and forth between Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains at the tail end of the Depression and the present day, Holman explores the repercussions of a country boy’s relocation to New York City, and the grasp that his past retains, shaping both his own life and those of his chosen and estranged loved ones. When 12-year-old Eddie Alley is accidentally struck by a car and injured, he’s thrust into a relationship with visiting WPA writer Tucker Hayes and the latter’s wife (and companion photographer) Sonia. An encounter with Eddie’s mother Cora, a locally renowned semi-recluse rumored to be a witch, changes Tucker’s life forever. And the power of Cora (an Eternal Feminine figure depicted with impressive intensity) follows the others back north. Eddie, whom Tucker had introduced to the bizarre pleasures of classic horror films, finds the big city a welcoming environment and achieves success as a comic TV horror-movie host (“Captain Casket”), marries (Ann) and fathers a daughter (Wallis). But when a homeless teenaged boy (Jasper) enters Eddie’s home, and his confused affections, it seems Cora will not be forgotten. Eddie’s feelings toward and about his mother remain unresolved. And the witch woman’s lingering aura haunts the imaginations and experiences of emotionally unstable Wallis, the eventually abandoned Ann and the sexually baffled Eddie, who will be further burdened by a steadily growing cancer (which is, sadly, much more than a metaphor). Holman tells this eerie tale with considerable skill, but it’s flawed by too-numerous time shifts and the discrepancy between the vivid, flinty scenes set in 1940 and later scenes that appear pallid and strained by comparison.
Flawed but intriguing work from an estimable novelist who keeps extending her range and never fails to surprise and engage.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1943-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
