One of those novels that promises much, by acclaimed Australian writer Johnson, now making her US debut, but never quite fulfills the expectations it raises. Family business left incomplete, stories flawed in the remembering, and a personal quest for fulfillment are the themes that Johnson explores in elegant, even poetic prose, as she tells the story of Ria Lubrano, who finally learns the truth in the metaphorical flying lessons she takes. Ever since brother Scott disappeared in the northern part of Australia, Ria, a singer of jingles, has found that her ``looking eye seems trained on other losses, other griefs. The world seems unbearably fragile, teetering a little on its axis.'' Her eyes become infected, and this condition—a metaphor for her blighted perceptions—together with the story of her grandmother Emma, who (Ria believes) defied her family, and a need to find Scott lead to her own flight to the great northern tableland. Here, in the town where her father and grandmother were born, she hopes ``to live fully and well.'' Ria joins a commune, hears tantalizing news of Scott, and, in alternating sections, relates the story of her grandmother Emma's life—as she understands it. A brief affair with a charismatic commune leader, and a meeting with her surviving great-aunt, provide the necessary lessons and moments of epiphany. When she learns that in truth Emma had never been ostracized by her family for marrying Italian—and Roman Catholic—Sam, Ria realizes that it's time she does ``some joining'' for Emma and Scott. ``She must go home for Scotty, so they will all be there to greet him. She must live with ordinary happiness, and embrace the living who need comfort more than the dead.'' Somehow Ria and her flight are too minor in key for the significance that Johnson tries to attach to them. Evocative descriptions of Australia, but this is too laden with unfulfilled intellectual ambitions to really take off.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-571-16217-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
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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