A better-than-average rock novel that thoughtfully addresses aging, art and relationships.
An aging rock singer heads to Europe for one more attempt to reckon with her music, her father and an old flame.
Anna Brundage, the narrator of D’Erasmo’s fourth novel (Creative Writing/Columbia; The Sky Below, 2009, etc.), is 44 and semifamous. An emotionally stark, drug-fueled album made her a cult figure a decade earlier, but the follow-up failed to connect. So she’s trying another tour, perhaps her last, financed by selling some ephemera of her famous-artist father. The overall shape of Wonderland hews to rock-novel convention. Squabbles with band members: check. Disastrous on-stage meltdown: check. Ill-advised one-night stand: check. But D’Erasmo writes about all of these things artfully and insightfully, giving Brundage a no-nonsense, road-worn tone that leaves equal room for pathos and humor. (For instance: “I had just essentially slept with a fan, and everyone knows that that’s the beginning of turning into a crazy hag with breast implants and lipstick drawn way beyond the lips.”) D’Erasmo is particularly good at capturing the randomness and joy of the creative process, and she links Anna’s songwriting with her father’s work, which involves aggressively sawing or blasting cross sections of trains and buildings. (An event concerning Anna’s father shifts the novel’s pitch midway through.) A subplot involving a fling with a man she met on an earlier tour is relatively thin, but it does give D’Erasmo an opportunity to openly ponder questions about how relationships fit alongside creativity and the simple business of paying the bills. Is Anna’s songwriting an essential part of her identity or a way to avoid confronting it? An invitation to stay on the road even longer gives this question a deeper urgency for Anna, and D’Erasmo wisely avoids giving her story a pat, simple ending.
A better-than-average rock novel that thoughtfully addresses aging, art and relationships.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-07481-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
PROFILES
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
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