An exuberant but ultimately self-indulgent engagement with esoterica.
Now in his late 70s, Least Heat-Moon ventures for the first time into fiction writing, and as one might expect from the author of Blue Highways (1982), the narrative involves both a journey and the musings of a philosophical mind.
Silas Fortunato is indeed fortunate to run into Dominique “Dolores” Heppermann in a random encounter, and he’s immediately intrigued, feeling he’s perhaps found a soul mate and sharer of his metaphysical meanderings. Silas courts her in his quirky and esoteric way, trying to engage her interest in compasses and armillary spheres. Eventually they marry and live in Old Sachem Hill, his ancestral home. Silas self-identifies as a “Cosmoterian”—someone who sees all existence as omnipotent—yet this scarcely clarifies the arcane nature of his beliefs. When Dominique’s sister Celeste, an aspiring nun questioning her vocation, comes to visit, Silas begins to see that he has more in common with his sister-in-law than with his wife. In fact, Dominique starts to break away from Silas’ effusive and unconventional intellect by taking a job as a real estate agent. She does well, but while at a convention in Las Vegas with her boss, she takes off in a private plane that mysteriously disappears. Deeply concerned, Silas hires detective Chamberlain Beckett to find out what happened, but during Beckett’s investigation Silas goes on a balloon ride and is injured in a fall. Celeste returns from the convent to help tend him, and despite (or perhaps because of) Silas’ growing depression, they begin to realize deeper feelings for each other. All this is rather fey, episodic, and unrestrained. Least Heat-Moon relies on lots of talk to convey a sense of character, and too often the talk is not terribly engaging, sometimes to the participants and, alas, often to the reader.
An exuberant but ultimately self-indulgent engagement with esoterica.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-941110-56-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Three Rooms Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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