A candid portrait of a man torn between two worlds, whose struggle will reverberate in readers’ souls.
When a young, wildly successful ad executive is unexpectedly fired from a 1970s Madison Avenue ad agency, he must come to terms with his closeted identity as a Stonewall-era gay man and differentiate the truly meaningful from the inconsequential in Baker’s debut.
Tim Halladay is nothing less than the golden boy at his high-profile New York ad agency. Recently promoted to vice president at the age of 27, he is the youngest company officer. Immersed in an opulent world of three-martini lunches and exorbitant expense accounts, Tim is living the dream. But when he is unexpectedly fired, his cloud bursts and he comes crashing back down to Earth. He soon realizes that, with a mere $300 in savings, his sizable credit card debt has morphed into a menacing leviathan that threatens to turn his world upside down. With no truly close friends to turn to, Tim is forced to look within himself for solace. At this point in the book the author begins a series of flashbacks; these detailed memories give readers an expansive depth of insight into Tim’s character and how he weathers the soul-searching dilemma in which he now finds himself. Baker nimbly leads readers back and forth through time, interweaving the defining moments of this young man’s life into the events of a long weekend. As Tim’s dysfunctional family and stuffy upbringing come into focus, the reason he’s chosen to keep his sexuality hidden becomes increasingly obvious: His father has long made it clear that Tim’s penchant for theater and his not-so-macho demeanor are utter disappointments. Tim will never fit neatly into his father’s country club mold, and they both know it. Nor is his mother much help, largely powerless in the patriarchal culture of 1950s Connecticut. Tim’s rejection of his father’s ideal has heavily influenced the man he has become. Readers from all backgrounds will find themselves empathizing with Baker’s protagonist as he struggles to reconcile his high-profile life with his true identity.
A candid portrait of a man torn between two worlds, whose struggle will reverberate in readers’ souls.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-1450271271
Page Count: 212
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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