A meandering road novel; full of bright details but never quite manages to go anywhere.
Hughes’ coming-of-age novel, set in the early ’80s, follows a young man’s brokenhearted road trip.
After a crushing breakup with his girlfriend, Collette, 20-something Mike Hogan decides to abandon his Hollywood dreams and flee. Pals Declan and Lewis—no fans of the City of Angels—join him, and the trio leave their humdrum jobs to drive across the United States, crashing with old friends along the way, with the eventual goal of flying to London to continue their trek across Europe. But really, the goal is to experience the voyage itself: “All of us looking for something that we couldn’t put into words.” As they set out on the open road, Mike ruminates on his childhood in Lowell, Massachusetts, and his college days in the nearby town of Amherst. He also mourns his dead relationship. Attentive to an ever changing landscape, Mike punctuates his reverie with rock songs from America and Britain: “Music was the soundtrack of my life. Through all of the good times it played in the background hum of my mind…the ups, the downs. How it wrenched at my heart. Was everybody like this?” Eventually making his way back to Lowell, Mike begins to reconsider the ultimate destination of his journey. As a prose stylist, debut author Hughes displays significant talent, detailing multihued scenes on a state-by-state tour (“Driving north now, our day was filled with Caribbean colors, with the waves still assaulting the cliffs below us as we drove on. We listened to more rock and roll music”). However, these moments, though beautifully rendered, rarely seem to move the central plot forward. The result is that the book often feels more like a diary than a novel, and the formidable trek across the continent feels oddly uneventful.
A meandering road novel; full of bright details but never quite manages to go anywhere.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4787-6570-7
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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