A disappointing misstep by a versatile writer (Going Native, 1994, etc.).
In this offbeat Civil War novel, a young abolitionist comes to terms with his times as he visits his slave-owning grandparents.
Liberty Fish is born in 1844 in Delphi, N.Y. His parents, Thatcher and Roxana, are ardent abolitionists, spending weeks away from home on the lecture circuit. They also shelter fugitive slaves. Just shy of 17, Liberty volunteers to join the Union army. After several close calls, he deserts his regiment in Georgia, feeling a “divine necessity” to visit his ancestral home (Roxana has quarreled bitterly with her parents and is no longer welcome on the South Carolina plantation where she was raised). Once there, Liberty realizes revenge is futile, though both grandparents are still mighty vicious. Ida is bedridden and Asa, a racist crackpot, is conducting horrifying experiments on his slaves to turn them white. As the Union forces close in, Liberty reluctantly joins Asa in flight to Charleston, where they embark for the Bahamas. Failing to commandeer the vessel, Asa jumps overboard, while Liberty returns to his Delphi home. There are many oddities here. The Civil War section begins only at the halfway point. The leisurely first half, Liberty’s childhood, is crowded with colorful minor characters; their prattle obscures the narrative like fog. Wright flirts with various possibilities (coming-of-age and/or Civil War stories, dysfunctional family saga) but then backs away from them. Liberty makes a curious protagonist, the resolute volunteer and equally resolute deserter becoming largely passive once he reaches the plantation, and that is what is most disturbing. Reasonable expectations that Liberty will prove a cathartic force, cleansing the plantation of its rottenness, go unmet. The problem is also one of tone; Wright surely does not mean to portray Asa as a lovable old rascal, but he comes uncomfortably close.
A disappointing misstep by a versatile writer (Going Native, 1994, etc.).Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-679-45117-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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