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WHEN THE FATES WHISPER

Name: WHEN THE FATES WHISPER
Author: Steven A. Lorenz
ISBN: 978-1479242658

by Steven A. Lorenz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 27, 2012

A sometimes-engaging novel of nostalgic Americana and small-town celebrations.

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A debut novel about a young man’s hijinks with his neighborhood friends.

Steven, the story’s 65-year-old narrator, reflects on his Midwestern childhood in Good Town. The only son of a “grain man” and a “fragile, timid poet,” Steven tells jovial tales of his teenage scrapes and capers, including stealing his grandfather’s car, sneaking beer into soda bottles and making an underage visit to a local saloon. These reminiscences of mostly summers and holidays span a decade, from 1956 to 1966. In nearly all instances, Steven emerges from incidents feeling triumphant, even when he’s been caught. “I wondered if I could walk on water,” he admits at one point. The novel invites readers to admire Steven, but its tone is often boastful. That said, its clearest moments of awareness arrive when Lorenz ventures into Good Town’s darker aspects. Steven’s father, Lee, for example, is rarely seen without “a tumbler of ice and bourbon.” When Lee takes a break from drinking, his son revealingly says that “the sober life had been a good life....Things around the house hadn’t gotten smashed up. I hadn’t had to worry about [Mom]…when things got rough.” Occasionally, Steven regards violence with amusement—after he steals a car, a neighbor “whip[s] up on [his] behind”—but in other instances, it causes lingering damage. For example, when Steven’s friend Bobbie upsets his father, “Bobbie’s mom was concerned for his physical safety,” sending him to Idaho “until things cooled off.” Overall, fathers are portrayed as quite dangerous—an idea that’s acknowledged without being fully explored. But when Steven views his father’s character flaws with humor, the result can be both disturbing and hilarious: “Don’t look in the rearview mirror: no good man is interested in where he’s been,” Lee tells his son. “Never signal for a turn; you lose the element of surprise.” In such moments, Lorenz almost approaches satire, but most of the novel asks to be taken at face value.

A sometimes-engaging novel of nostalgic Americana and small-town celebrations.

Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2012

ISBN: 978-1479242658

Page Count: 210

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2013

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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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.