Great expectations and a large canvas boil down to vibrant local color, undying attachments and a lot of sex.
Restless spirits disrupt a contemporary marriage in this epic first novel set against the vivid backdrop of India’s shift into modernity.
Tejpal’s fluent, sprawling, ambitious debut intends to span love and sex, colonialism and independence, India’s partition and many more polarities. It opens with a loss of desire: The nameless narrator’s previously infinite lust for sex with Fizz, his partner for 15 years, has evaporated. Six months later, the couple will have separated both from each other and from the fabulous old house they share in the foothills of the Himalayas. At an unhurried pace, the story then backtracks to the start of the relationship, dwelling obsessively on its carnality when not charting, at length, the narrator’s plodding and unsuccessful attempts to write a novel. The panoply of Indian life—historical and contemporary, urban and rural—is presented in richly descriptive detail (particularly the sex), while the subcontinent’s politics is discussed in sweeping statements and metaphors. The story chugs toward its turning point: the death of the narrator’s grandmother, whose legacy pays for the country house, where renovations uncover a sealed box and 64 volumes of a journal. These scribbles form the story of Catherine, an American traveler in pursuit of love and desire during the colonial era who becomes the wife of a gay Indian prince and lover of her servant, or, as the narrator puts it: “Lady Chatterley does the lower Himalayas.” It is the narrator’s obsession with Catherine’s story and his salacious hallucinations about her that brings about the end of his marriage. Two-and-a-half more years are needed to finish the diaries, longer still to solve the mystery of Catherine’s death and restore her daughter’s legacy, but he earns thereby his reunion with Fizz.
Great expectations and a large canvas boil down to vibrant local color, undying attachments and a lot of sex.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-088856-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
© 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.
