Berger takes on the suburban police novel in his latest deadpan deconstruction. Frustrated and tantalized when the patrolmen she's called out to investigate her neighbor's failure to answer the phone or the doorbell leave without doing anything but ringing the bell themselves, placidly nosey Mary Jane Jones lets herself in the back door and discovers Donna Howland and her daughter Amanda, three, both murdered. Shocked Larry Howland returns from a business trip to find himself a widower. It isn't long, though, before the police find that he's never left town; he's been enjoying his latest stint in the Starry Night Motel, accompanied by garish decor, adult videos, and his boss's wife. But Officers Nick Moody and Dennis LeBeau soon give up on him as a suspect and focus on his shiftless half-brother Lloyd, who'd been having an unnervingly bad day, revealed in a series of merciless crosscuts, even before the cops started looking for him. Lloyd had broken his shaver, gotten fired from still another job, angered his boss into lodging a complaint against him, gotten pinched attempting to steal a rubber duckie from the local five-and-ten, and walked into a liquor store determined to rob it—only to stumble on the bloody aftermath of an earlier robbery. In anyone else's hands such elaborate forebodings would be the stuff of melodrama, but master parodist Berger piles up detail on detail with such cool detachment that the whole lurid whodunit recedes into the distance, as if you were watching it through the wrong end of a telescope. What emerges in its place is a crazy quilt of subplots—Lloyd's adventures with trucker Molly Sparks, the growing friction between Moody and LeBeau, and an insultingly inconsequential solution to the mystery—whose lack of connection gives the tale a gravely comic tone. Not the most successful of Berger's enigmatic sendups; as in Robert Crews (1994), fans of the genre under dissection are more likely to be bemused than enlightened.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-688-11925-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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