A portrait of life: poignant, true, and deeply felt.
Hanson fills a quiet Maine town with colorful characters in this debut literary novel.
Claire has grown up with a sense of both gravity and beauty in her life. On the one hand, she has her mother, who was born in Dresden, Germany, barely survived World War II, and considers every day a caution more than a gift. On the other, her father, a welder and a talented cook who fills their home with haute cuisine beyond the reach of the average nuclear family, is often stubborn and serious in his pride. So Claire stands reserved—dark, even. She sees doom everywhere, only processing it through storytelling. And while her little sister, Grace, has a similar eye for impending disaster, she possesses a more romantic or tragic view of things. But what the story conveys, far more than Claire—at least to her own mind—is that even in the face of tragedy, life continues. It adapts. The members of the community spring into action to address injury, accident, or death but then simply accept and incorporate it into the fabric of their daily lives. And at the same time, the reader sees how this sort of response isn’t good enough to address the longer-standing, more poisonous problems in Claire’s town and family, most particularly her father’s alcoholism. And it’s only now, as Claire’s last summer before high school draws to a close and she finds herself on the cusp of childhood’s end, that real tragedies and intractable problems—and her inability to stop or fix them—begin to weigh on her. Literary fiction often features narrators who are more observers or secondary actors than protagonists, but Claire is that rare character who is both disconnected from and intimately a part of her world. In this way, the novel manages to capture the feelings of helplessness or lack of agency that are so endemic to both childhood and the contemporary American zeitgeist. Unfortunately, the book is very short and might benefit from more time to explore the other characters and the community—details that push the reader to truly inhabit the tale. Nevertheless, it’s a rare, excellent character study and a fantastic read besides.
A portrait of life: poignant, true, and deeply felt.Pub Date: July 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-74557-1
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Shadowlight Press
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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