A rambling but interesting debut (winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize) about a troubled family that comes under the influence of a drifter and his drug-dealing boss. Single mothers can—t ever expect to have an easy time of it, but single mothers who drink too much have to be prepared for the worst. Donna Bless tries hard to do right by her boys Nelson and Wesley, but she’s basically a party girl at heart and can—t resist an evening (maybe even a whole night) at a local honky-tonk whenever the opportunity presents itself. One of her partners in crime is a strange, charismatic barfly named Roy Dale, who steps in one evening when a local cowboy comes on too strong after the third beer and won—t take no for an answer. Roy flattens the sap with a single punch, then offers Maggie a chaser. The result: she falls for him head over heels. Roy offers Wesley a job working on his friend Sam Casey’s farm, good money for outdoor work in the boy’s spare time. The Casey spread was at one time a full-fledged commune and is still pretty weird to this day. Nothing much grows there but marijuana, though there’s enough of that to keep everyone busy and ensure that Sam stays in the black. Sam himself is a decent sort, somewhat addled but humane. Roy, however, turns out to be a good deal less benign than he first appeared. For one thing, he’s a thoroughgoing lush, and he’s quickly becoming a kind of surrogate father to the boys. Maggie worries about his influence on them, but she herself has become so entwined in his world of drink and drugs that she doesn—t know how to get out. Can will power and mother’s love overcome ordinary human weakness? Even when it’s overlaid with addiction? Badly organized and far too loose, but Tharp’s debut has a poignancy and grace that gets it over the bumps on its way: Worth a look.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-57131-030-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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 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
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SEEN & HEARD
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