Blend Tristram Shandy with, say, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and you have something of the spirit of this spirited tale: a...
I’m a boy, but my mother won’t admit it: an entertaining yet philosophically inclined stroll along some decidedly little-visited lanes and mews in Georgian England.
It makes sense, at least of a sort, that British musician Stace—whose nom de guitare is John Wesley Harding—should pick up a tip from Pete Townshend, and perhaps Mick Jagger, about gender-bending and its associated dysfunctions and malfunctions and then let the story roll. That story is, superficially, simple: a youngish English lord named, with all due symbolism, Geoffrey Loveall, is out on an errand that takes him through the back streets of London. Though he “had no curiosity about his surroundings,” Loveall “knew to keep half an eye on the passing world to soothe the tottering of his carriage,” and with that half-eye open finds an abandoned baby. His mother, the arch Lady Loveall, is a little suspicious of the discovery: “Have you read this baby into being? Found it in the library? Did you bring it to life in your dollhouse? I cannot believe for a moment that you have created it in a natural way.” Ah, natural ways just won’t do in aristocratic circles, and with the help of a mysterious governess, the foundling boy is on his way to being raised as a girl to meet a perceived gap in the makeup of the Loveall household. Adventures and misadventures ensue, and Stace pulls off a neat trick by shifting narrators in midstream, keeping the reader guessing and on his (or, dare we say, her) toes as Lady Rose Loveall does his thing. Stace’s abundant cleverness sometimes slips into preciousness, but the narrative is full of surprises, mixing up an utterly modern—and even postmodern—story of sexual awakening and self-discovery with a quirky but believable portrait of life, at least of a kind, in early modern England, all very well done.
Blend Tristram Shandy with, say, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and you have something of the spirit of this spirited tale: a most promising debut.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-316-83034-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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