Comic actor/screenwriter Fry (the TV series A Bit of Fry and Laurie, etc.) weighs in with a fulsomely naughty first novel about a lascivious, blandly prevaricating English schoolboy cast adrift at public school, on the streets, at Cambridge, and in MI5. Adrian Healey—his chances in life already dented by his months as a London prostitute and his cocaine arrest—arrives at Cambridge with a reputation for insatiable sexual appetites (``Love was Adrian's guilty secret, sex his public pride'') and a strong aversion to telling the truth. Challenged by Donald Trefusis, the Senior Tutor who catches him in plagiarism, to produce some kind—any kind—of original work, Adrian takes a breather from his romantic pursuit of Hugo Cartwright (whom he's already had briefly in a lav before he realized that this was True Love) to penetrate the college's extensive collection of Victorian pornography and ``discover'' three chapters of Peter Flowerbuck, Dickens's lost pornographic masterpiece—which only Donald, of all the luminaries in the college, recognizes as Adrian's own work. Meantime, italicized interchapters have already suggested that (a) largely as a result of such high jinks, Donald will end up inveigling Adrian into an elaborate and dangerous spy plot to take delivery of Mendax, a device that prevents the user from lying, and (b) espionage Ö l`anglaise is just as foppish and foolish as the groves of academe, which so often furnish its personae. The treatment throughout is manic, in-your-face, and taboo-busting in the tradition of Orton, Monty Python, and numberless graffiti artists. Chockablock with witless pranks, single-entendres, lesser dolts like Pigs Trotter and Dr. Humphrey Biffen, and allusions to Shakespeare, Saki, Wilde, and George Herbert. Too British in its calculated outrageousness to repeat its bestselling performance on this side of the Atlantic, but still dizzyingly, peerlessly sophomoric. (Film rights to Paramount)
Pub Date: May 24, 1993
ISBN: 0-939149-82-6
Page Count: 277
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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