An enviably intelligent piece of writing.
Rayfiel’s third novel continues the education of Eve from Colony Girl (1999).
Fifteen-year-old Eve (“No last names in the Bible”) had a kind of sexual education at a lonely religious colony in Iowa—12 families of refugees from the world trying to lead Christian lives. Although Eve wound up working at a strip-joint before she abandoned the colony and headed for Manhattan, she left as a virgin. Now 17, she works as a bar-girl at an illegal after-hours tourist trap in Times Square. Rayfiel brilliantly captures her bent attention span and seafoam sensitivity to the sounds and streets of Manhattan (“The streets themselves have that booming emptiness of a shell held to the ear”) at five a.m. as she walks home from work and sees what seems to be a couple having standup sex on the street, which may, however, be rape, and in fact quickly turns to murder. Later that day, Eve gets the only mail she’s ever received, an invitation to a gallery exhibit. Marron, the artist, has photographed her vagina, rented poster space in the subway for a week, and then framed and hung five graffiti-enriched posters as art objects. For 15 minutes at the show, Eve falls in love with tall, handsome Horace, an artist who smells of sandalwood (“the love of my life”), then forgets about him. Later, Horace seeks her out, though Marron has a key to his apartment. Drunk, Eve decides to quit as a barmaid and evolve (“really, to a higher plane of emotional maturity”). The story, in fact, revolves about Eve waiting and wanting to be a woman. Should she marry her boss, Viktor, and help him get his green card? Or find womanhood with Horace in Tuscany? What about the $10,000 she’s offered to help the mentally disturbed woman she saw stab the “rapist”?
An enviably intelligent piece of writing.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45516-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
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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