A debut novel—half comedy, half treatise on ’60s fallen dreams—that offers amusing insights but ultimately fails to persuade. Rod Huxley, onetime celebrated author, in 1972, of the political manifesto Cookbook for Revolution: 150 Ways to Boil, Broil, and Fry the Rich, has sunk into obscurity. Thanks to a $400 thousand contribution (by a nutty, albeit wealthy, fellow revolutionary), Huxley can afford to live a comfortable life of anonymity and lethargy in Denver with his two cats. That is, until the FBI contacts him with the news that a terrorist is holding hostages in a D.C. Burger King—and that only the appearance of Huxley will appease the bomber. Convinced that the terrorist is none other than his long-ago benefactor grown tired with waiting for the Huxley-inspired revolution, he agrees to travel to Washington but wearies of the FBI agent’s idiocy (as does the reader) and soon ditches him, trying to make his own, blundering way to the capitol. During the course of the journey, and sporadically throughout the story, Huxley reminisces about his renegade youth, the ultimate futility of his endeavors, and the possibility of regaining lost ideals. When he finally gets inside the Burger King, he finds that his old college flame and comrade-in-arms Sara is holding the tourists hostage, orchestrating everything in order to get Huxley back in the spotlight and writing again—he needs saving, she needs saving, the whole world needs saving. And convincing him to wake up and get to work again is (she thinks) the only solution. The two miraculously escape the feds, police, and helicopters circling overhead. Sara then takes Huxley to her apartment . . . . LaMarr’s contrasting styles of silliness and seriousness is effective, but the novel still misses the mark—and neither mode is fully realized.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-87081-501-6
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Univ. Press of Colorado
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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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