A chronicle of a bride’s engagement ultimately becomes a kind of wedding favor. In all probability, people (women especially) like to recall the months preceding their weddings mainly because they—re so impressed that they survived them. Our unnamed narrator is a good example: She opens her story with her fiancÇ Michael’s proposal and closes it with her wedding, along the way providing a warmly excruciating account of every bump in the road linking the one to the other. A 36-year-old ad copywriter in San Francisco, the bride-to-be has known Michael for three years and lived with him for six months by the time he gets around to popping the question. He’s ten years her senior, a divorced marketing director with one daughter from his previous marriage. Naturally, both bride and groom are scared to death. She still suffers from the memory of her mother’s disastrous marriage to her father, a drunken Presbyterian preacher who eventually lost all his faith in God and most of it in himself. As for Michael, he still cries every time he hears his daughter refer to her stepfather as “Daddy.” On a less extreme level, there are the usual arguments and recriminations; the inevitable mother-in-law angst (—Ilene told me that women have to act like the man is smarter, even though he’s not, and they have to act like the man is stronger, even though he’s not.—); and the inevitable break-off that gets patched up in short order. Most of the trouble, though, is in the myriad trivial details that surround the significant change in the bride’s life. But her shrink Reuben helps talk her through everything, and all her friends pitch in with support until the big day arrives. And then, of course, she’s on her own—almost. Good-natured if unremarkable fun that veers dangerously close to the tear-jerking sentimentality Erma Bombeck made into a career. Not likely to be reread very long after the honeymoon. (First printing of 75,000)
Pub Date: May 12, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40652-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
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.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
