Despite some forced humor and strained parallels: a stylish debut.
An amusing debut novel that tries to put—and mostly succeeds in putting—an unusual spin on the clash between love and career, as the writer of a dissertation on Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor finds some eerie echoes in her own work and love life.
Narrator Ella Kennedy, who traces her interest in political theory to a crush on a former professor, has had trouble finding a subject for her doctoral thesis. And she needs a job because her father, who owns a chain of profitable discount stores, thinks Ella should now be self-supporting. So when her longtime friend Lisa, whose husband and child provide the tug of domesticity, suggests Ella move back to Washington, her hometown, and take over Lisa's job, she agrees. Her new boss is the Colonel, a former chief librarian at the Library of Congress whose ideas got him into trouble there, and who now heads a think tank, the Institute of Thought. (Both the Institute and the Colonel cleverly parody Washington institutions and types.) The Colonel, an elusive, hard-drinking man, needs a Marxist, for he's been give a grant by the Neoclassicists for Universal Thought (NUTS, of course) who want people to rethink Marx. As Ella struggles to develop a Web site for Marx and dig up Marx-related artifacts to sell, she begins a dissertation on Eleanor Marx, who fell in love and lived with a married man—a situation that neatly parallels her own, as she promptly falls in love with married, mysterious British ornithologist Nigel. The story is driven by the obligatory farcical mistakes and unlikely liaisons: the Neoclassicists turn out to be Russian Mafia seeking to launder money, and Nigel writes a play about birds that premieres in one of stores owned by Ella's father. The course of true love is no less fraught either.
Despite some forced humor and strained parallels: a stylish debut.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0003-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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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