A protagonist too good to be true lessens the appeal of this historical novel.
In this first installment of a planned multivolume family saga, Brown (A Taste for Truth, 2012) begins the life story of Harriet Clark, a talented young musician who escapes her hardscrabble Arkansas upbringing for the opportunities and temptations of 1920s Chicago.
At 4 years old, Harriet lives with her abusive stepfather and submissive mother. Her prospects are bleak until, in a rare moment of assertiveness, her mother insists she begin piano lessons. The little girl shows unusual talent, so much that her first teacher wheedles the town’s Episcopal minister, Jed Thorne—once on track to become a concert violinist until he suffered a crippling hand injury—to take her on as a pupil. Jed and his family—his widowed mother and uncle—stimulate Harriet’s musical talent and her intellectual appetites. As she matures and Jed realizes that he too must step aside for a more experienced teacher, he finds her employment with wealthy friends Fred and Lavinia Norwood in Evanston, Ill. Harriet quickly becomes a favorite with the family’s daughters, Ethel and Florence, but her own musical studies are put on hold until funding is provided by other influential Chicagoans, one of whom discovers Harriet’s singing talent is even greater than her skill at the keyboard. But an ill-advised love affair thwarts Harriet’s path to opera stardom. And it’s this affair that finally derails the promise of the novel. The writing isn’t bad: The sentences are varied and assured and the vocabulary extensive, although sometimes a penchant for historical research leads to tedious lists of furniture, descriptions of outfits and minilectures on architecture. The biggest flaw, however, is Harriet herself. She’s simply good at nearly everything: the best piano player, the greatest singer, the most amazing, engaging teacher. She’s even fantastic in bed, despite showing little sign of sexual curiosity until she’s suddenly sleeping with a married man twice her age. It makes the reader realize in retrospect that most of the other characters primarily gush about Harriet’s excellence.
A protagonist too good to be true lessens the appeal of this historical novel.Pub Date: June 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-1477537879
Page Count: 378
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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