A soused black sheep goes home to repair frayed family ties in Arrants’ debut novel.
James Nichelson, second son of a publishing dynasty, is a budding writer who finds his soul mate in fetching young painter Bren; feeling that their creative potential can never thrive in moneyed Hilton Head, S.C., they plan to decamp for New York. Alas, Bren gets a professorship at a local university, which precipitates a colossal rift that is briefly and unwisely bridged during a tryst on the eve of Bren’s wedding to James’ bossy older brother, Jonathan. James spends the next few years in Manhattan squalor, working in the Dantean circle of a bar called the Free-fall Club and nursing an epic snit against Bren, Jonathan and the world, unappeased by the no-strings-attached sexual ministrations of a gorgeous, possibly transsexual barmaid named Crystal. He vents his spleen in an unpublished novel and in endless barroom tirades that develop a local following, with Crystal keeping count of his favorite obscenity—rhymes with yuck—on a gong. (Unfortunately, this gong eggs on his rants rather than ushering him off the stage.) Called back by his parents’ deaths, James ensconces himself at the family retreat at Echo Mountain, a bucolic setting tailor-made for nonstop drinking, writer’s block and boozy recriminations. Can further tragedy reunite him with Bren, Jonathan, a cute little girl of questionable parentage and his muse? In telling this swollen saga, Arrants proves himself a talented but fantastically undisciplined and self-indulgent writer. His padded-out prose lurches between cynicism, sentimentality and cloying sex banter, all belabored at unseemly length and volume and badly decorated with song lyrics. James’ loud, profane, sarcastic soliloquies, omnipresent because he is protagonist and narrator, can be vigorous and beguiling in their cocky Southernism, but they are so longwinded that they suck the air out of the novel. A colorful but bloated and exhausting tale of a man swimming through alcohol toward maturity.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2011
ISBN: 978-1461024729
Page Count: 712
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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