The unwitting laughter he steadily evokes, page by page, makes Grimes (City of God, 1995) a joyous dark humorist.
Dystopian satire on the Information Age and medicated students that may well charm its way intravenously into the hearts of younger readers.
Its sublime dialogue certainly will appeal to youths pondering the vacuity of modern life. Ludlow Press opens this spring with a pair of manic original trade paperbacks (see Perez, below). WILL is a psychopharmacologically medicated post-post-post-post-modern college student who can’t adjust to the notion of homework and is failing all courses, his GPA now sunk to 1.55. His mother isn’t much help (“I just don’t feel I can give you any advice I can honestly say I subscribe to”), and there’s also the problem of Information Sickness (IS). WILL, at 19, is a Virology major: he studies viruses, the ultimate information systems that leave you sick or dying. And IS is an “overload of information. A disease so insidious that its spread was relentless, detection nearly impossible, and the infection rate potentially universal.” “Like maybe, information has a half-life or something. It accretes in your system until there’s some kind of mega-overload. Or maybe if everything’s absurd, and true, and instantly contradicted and meaningless, existential fusion occurs. You’re hit with a metaphysical hydrogen bomb composed of the world’s bullshit and beauty.” The smart disease for a wired world kills 47 on campus [“CAUSE ALLUDES AUTHORITIES”], with Hollywood dickering for movie rights, while the university claims all rights to the virus. Like Don Quixote, WILL gears up his wonder computer, Spunk, and sets out on a superclueless epicqwest of memoir-therapy toward a world-saving myth amid the hopeless culturebabble. Whether conversing with doctors, student counselor, the brainy Naomi (his Dulcinea), he’s fabulously talkative.
The unwitting laughter he steadily evokes, page by page, makes Grimes (City of God, 1995) a joyous dark humorist.Pub Date: May 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-9713415-7-5
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Ludlow Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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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