A short, resonant novel of masculinity and fatherhood.
Thorpe’s novel tells the story of a man in crisis on a pilgrimage to Hemingway’s grave.
Wes Haas is a novelist and professor challenged by the academy on his definition of “literary” and his inability to intuit the meaning of “competence.” In response, Haas has undertaken a road trip to Ketchum, Idaho, to see the grave of Ernest Hemingway, his earliest and most important influence as a writer. On the way, he picks up his son, Linus, a 13-year-old Haas hasn’t seen in nearly a year who lives with Haas’ ex-wife in Montana. As he rolls through the small towns of the northwestern United States, Haas is confronted with the myriad ghosts of his present and past: his failed marriage, his stagnant career, and his relationship with a mercurial ballet dancer named Aletheia. The result is a mashup of campus novel and road book, a movable inquiry into the crafts of writing and life, and a quest for, as the title implies, competence. The premise may seem a bit clumsy: readers may wonder if Hemingway isn’t the sort of writer whom the young are meant to love but then outgrow. Thorpe attempts to address this issue early on: “By reading short stories like ‘Big Two Hearted River’ and ‘Now I Lay Me,’ Haas learned the value of actual words that exist on the flattened sheet of paper, not merely intended ones…his pilgrimage to Hemingway’s grave did not then seem a stupid cliché to him, but a fitting tribute to a human being who had changed his life.” Even so, Thorpe isn’t doing the expected Hemingway impression of staccato lines and muscular prose (though Haas’ present narrative is intercut with flashbacks from his past rendered in Hemingway-esque italics). This is a novel about attempting to move beyond one’s influences and even moving beyond one’s past mistakes. Though the ghost of Hemingway hangs heavily over the book, Thorpe manages to carve out some admirable literary territory of his own. The reader discovers not a larger-than-life Papa Hemingway, but a relatable man coming to terms with his own adequacy in a world of vague expectations.
A short, resonant novel of masculinity and fatherhood.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1503133808
Page Count: 218
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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