Gaily self-amused, told in tart memos, cheeky checklists, sighs, essays, legal briefs, and heartsick journal entries....
Gay guys go gaga. By the author of the well-received baseball novel The Last Days of Summer (1998).
In 1978, Travis Puckett and all-star quarterback and shortstop Craig McKenna fall for each other at Beckley School in Tarrytown, New York, but ignore and put each other off until, well, all resistance fades and they kiss on a rainy day under a viaduct and then spend hours in each other’s arms. Craig is a sports star with a body to die for while Travis obsesses over Broadway musicals and collects every cast recording ever made, once even cutting classes and hiking 300 miles to buy a used LP of Greenwillow with Tony Perkins in a singing role. Craig prefers Tony stabbing women in the shower. The two go off to colleges on opposite coasts and lose track of each other. In 1998, Travis is teaching American History at the University of Southern California; he requires all of his jocks’ student essays to relate to sports figures, and, meanwhile, tries to get a grant to write a book, Alexander Hamilton and the Designated Hitter. He has also spent years rooming with his old Beckley roommate Gordon Dubois, who’s now a screenwriter for Argosy Entertainment, sort of, and begins scripting this very novel. Though in Splitsville, Gordo and Travis live together, albeit in separate parts of the house. Craig, meanwhile, has a law partnership with fellow Harvard grad Charleen Webb in Saratoga Springs, New York, wants to organize a teensy Freedom to Marry March on Washington, and loves Clayton Bergman, who runs a hardware business, gives Craig a platinum wedding ring—and they’re together 12 years. Both Travis and Craig have full lives, but Travis, sigh, finds something missing. Can Brigadoon be reborn? So Travis leaves Gordo and heads for Saratoga Springs. Once there, can he get Craig away from Clayton?
Gaily self-amused, told in tart memos, cheeky checklists, sighs, essays, legal briefs, and heartsick journal entries. Straights may nod off.Pub Date: May 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-059583-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an...
True love flares between two people, but they find that circumstances always impede it.
On a winter day in London, Laurie spots Jack from her bus home and he sparks a feeling in her so deep that she spends the next year searching for him. Her roommate and best friend, Sarah, is the perfect wing-woman but ultimately—and unknowingly—ends the search by finding Jack and falling for him herself. Laurie’s hasty decision not to tell Sarah is the second painful missed opportunity (after not getting off the bus), but Sarah’s happiness is so important to Laurie that she dedicates ample energy into retraining her heart not to love Jack. Laurie is misguided, but her effort and loyalty spring from a true heart, and she considers her project mostly successful. Perhaps she would have total success, but the fact of the matter is that Jack feels the same deep connection to Laurie. His reasons for not acting on them are less admirable: He likes Sarah and she’s the total package; why would he give that up just because every time he and Laurie have enough time together (and just enough alcohol) they nearly fall into each other’s arms? Laurie finally begins to move on, creating a mostly satisfying life for herself, whereas Jack’s inability to be genuine tortures him and turns him into an ever bigger jerk. Patriarchy—it hurts men, too! There’s no question where the book is going, but the pacing is just right, the tone warm, and the characters sympathetic, even when making dumb decisions.
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an emotional, satisfying read.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-57468-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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