Kirn's first novel relies on the same plain style and midwestern sensibility that characterized his collection of stories, My Hard Bargain (1990). It's a timely melodrama about faith and apostasy set against a bleak landscape of dying farms and bland city-life. Weaver Wolquist, a 26-year-old born-again Christian, meets Kim Lindgren, a 23-year-old aspiring greeting-card illustrator, outside a St. Paul abortion clinic. A few months pregnant, Kim decides against the operation after confronting the prostrate Weaver, a ``very proud'' member of the anti-abortion group ``The Conscience Squad.'' Impressed by Weaver's sincerity, Kim eventually befriends the former drugged-out head-banger, himself ``saved'' by the charismatic Lucas Barnes, a Prozac-popping strategist and proselytizer for the Bryce St. Church of God. Despite his religious certainty, Weaver is a reluctant salesman of Christian beauty products, and instead relies on an allowance from his widowed mother, a successful businesswoman in Wisconsin. As ``circumstances'' begin to overtake ``beliefs,'' Weaver chastely pursues his mission with Kim over the objections of the paranoid Lucas. A trip to the Lindgren family farm in North Dakota is meant to convince Kim of her righteous decision not to abort. Instead, Weaver finds her family as dysfunctional and craven as any he's met—from Kim's angry ``motorhead'' brother to her selfish parents, rich on government set-asides. The celibate Weaver finally consummates his love for kim, breaks all ties with the increasingly violent Lucas, has a reconciliation with his mother, and acknowledges he's no one's savior. As much about spiritual hunger as the abortion controversy, Kirn's straight-talking fiction contributes greatly to our understanding of the antinomian tendencies in American fundamentalism. Its very simplicity also makes it a perfect candidate for the screen.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-78091-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1992
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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