Brownrigg considers motherhood, romance, identity, and the changes brought by time in this tender, insightful novel.
Two women, former lovers, reconnect with each other and themselves in Brownrigg’s sequel (which can be read independently) to her 2001 novel, Pages for You.
Flannery Jansen is married to a famous artist, living in the Bay Area, and raising (not quite single-handedly) the couple’s young daughter, Willa. When Flannery was in her 20s, before she became the third wife of the mercurial, charismatic Charles Marshall, she wrote two books, one a bestselling erotic memoir about her journey across Mexico with the woman who was then her lover to find her absent “aging American hippie” father. But the chapter of Flannery’s life that left the deepest emotional imprint on her came earlier still, when she was a coltish undergrad at Yale, deeply in love with a graduate student named Anne Arden. Anne taught Flannery about art, literature, and, ultimately, heartbreak. When Flannery’s thoughts keep her up at night, she turns them to the perfect relationship she imagines Anne has with the man for whom she left her, Jasper. But just as motherhood has dramatically altered Flannery’s identity and trajectory, Anne’s decision never to have children has shaped hers. Jasper, having developed a sudden, late-in-life yearning to have kids, has abandoned Anne after two decades together to start a family with someone else—someone young and French. Reunited at a literary conference—“Women Write the World”—at the university where their original love story played out, Flannery and Anne find their ways back to each other. In so doing, each woman also finds her way back to herself. Brownrigg (The Delivery Room, 2008, etc.) approaches her characters with clarity and sensitivity, capturing the nuances in the women’s relationships to the people they love—as mother, daughter, sister, friend, wife, or lover—and the power they give those people to define and inspire them. Though the author’s touch is generally deft, the prose does, at times, get a bit moist. Ultimately, however, the story is propelled less by the thrill of the erotic than by the pull of loves lost and selves seemingly left behind yet always with us.
Brownrigg considers motherhood, romance, identity, and the changes brought by time in this tender, insightful novel.Pub Date: July 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61902-933-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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