The coming-of-age of two adolescents in the drugged 1970s, by the author of Until Your Heart Stops (1993) and the Flannery O’Connor Award collection of 1992, Low Flying Aircraft. Elizabeth Pinski first notices Patrick McConnell because he’s so nondescript: small, friendless, and always wearing the same worn-out sweater. Then in the high-school choir, Elizabeth hears him hit a high C and, a talented musician herself, falls in love. Patrick loves her, too, partly because of the long scar up her arm, the result of an accident in her childhood. Both of McNally’s characters are shy as deer, sensitive, wounded: Elizabeth’s physical scar seems also to be psychic; and Patrick, a newcomer to Paradise Valley, Arizona, is still shaky after his father’s suicide. There’s an obstacle, though, to their love: Elizabeth’s brutal boyfriend Bittner, whose rough strength and lack of subtlety she had thought she could cling to as a bulwark against the hedonistic environment she’s growing up in, where sex and cocaine salve despair. Bittner beats up Patrick, and he doesn’t interfere when a cocaine addict has sex with a dozen young men in order to pay for her habit, then tries to kills herself. Elizabeth saves the girl and undergoes a spiritual change: She finds that sweet Patrick is strong, too, in his innate decency. Patrick has a clever dog, Germs, and the three cruise the strip of their rambunctious new suburb north of Phoenix, finding not only love but the values they—ll need to survive in an amoral world. Once again, though, Bittner enters their lives, bringing with him the euphoria of cocaine and the misery that follows it, but they pull through. Elizabeth and Patrick have real charm, particularly in scenes with Patrick’s delightful dog, but the drug story nearly overwhelms them.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-84469-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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