Either DeBartolo’s satire is very subtle or this is the most pretentious novel about rock music ever written.
A rock journalist sacrifices her relationship with a brilliant rock musician when her fear of flying threatens to hold back his career.
DeBartolo (The God-Shaped Hole, 2001) treats rock music as high art in this self-important romance. After landing an interview with her idol, legendary rocker Doug Blackman, fledgling journalist Eliza Caelum moves to Manhattan to take a job with a music magazine. She finds herself sharing an apartment with Paul Hudson, lead singer of the band Bananafish, who takes his music very seriously and loves the same Doug Blackman song as she: “The Day I Became a Ghost” (Blackman’s no Dylan, or even Dave Mathews.) Soon, Paul and Eliza have fallen deeply in love. Paul’s talent begins to bring the band attention both from an independent producer and from a mega-corporate record company. Drawn to the independent, Paul nevertheless signs with the corporate jerks for the sake of his fellow band members’ financial interest. Despite his own misgivings about becoming a sellout, Eliza is thrilled for him. He, in turn, proposes marriage and wants her to accompany him on tour. Unfortunately, that would entail flying. Her airplane phobia began when her parents died in a plane crash and intensified after she witnessed the 9/11 attack. Not about to let her unwillingness to fly derail Paul’s career, she lets Doug Blackman’s son Loring, a handsome mainstream musician (i.e., sellout) with an obvious crush on her, kiss her when she knows Paul will see them. As expected, Paul assumes the worst. He goes on tour alone and sleeps with a groupie. Eliza moves in with Loring while pining for Paul and his pure rock-’n’-roll soul. Paul’s album bombs because it isn’t commercial enough. Paul and Eliza reunite and make love. Paul commits suicide. Or does he.
Either DeBartolo’s satire is very subtle or this is the most pretentious novel about rock music ever written.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-4022-0521-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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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