This riveting melodrama is the first full-length novel in English from the young Chinese author of the brilliant novella Raise the Red Lantern (1993). Cinematic vividness and speed are in fact distinguishing features of the powerful story of Five Dragons, an ambitious young man who escapes the misery and famine that devastate his provincial homeland for ``success'' in a teeming city (near Shanghai) itself endangered by widespread poverty, gang warfare, and Japanese military occupation, in the years just before Communism. Taken in by the Feng family proprietors of a thriving rice emporium, Five Dragons is seduced into marriage with its wanton daughter Cloud Weave, then later weds her embittered younger sister Cloud Silk. Prosperity and power ensue, but nothing mollifies this stoical antihero's envy and indignation; nor is there solace in the children he siresa brood of greedy, sexually voracious, murderous mutants whose rapacity reaches a feverish climax as the frail Five Dragons, dying, is overpowered by the worthless son who has coveted even his father's gold teeth. The concatenation of horrors is relentless, and the imageswhich make ingenious connections among hunger, aggressiveness, and sexualityare appallingly graphic and violent. Yet Su Tong's characters, simultaneously grotesque and realistic, are drawn with such intensity that we believe them capable of anything (``The men in our family are born killers,...the women senseless sluts''). Page by page, the novel stuns us with a sequence of hallucinatory, disturbing inventions: the savage beating of a small boy and the hideous revenge he exacts; the murders of several prostitutes, ordered by the enraged, syphilitic Five Dragons, the image of his ravaged, suppurating body rising up defiantly out of the vinegar baths that keep him, against all odds, stubbornly still alive. Rice ensnares, and outstares you; no matter how extreme and operatic its content, you simply cannot not believe it. Balzac and Zola would have recognized a kindred spirit in Su Tong, whose extraordinary pictures of the extremes to which human beings drive one another and themselves seem scarcely inferior to their own.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-688-13245-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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