The same structural shakiness that undermined A Midnight Clear and Scumbler affects this new Wharton effort: an overwhelming metaphor soaks through the otherwise crisp-enough narrative, making it soggy (here it's actually a double story, joined) and, worse, utterly pre-ordained. Wharton's a good enough novelist to keep you hoping this wet and shaggy theme will stand, shake itself off, and surprise you—yet it doesn't happen. The two complementary plots? In the summer of 1938, a Philadelphia factory worker, getting too much heat because of his union activities, spirits his young family off to Wildwood, New Jersey, for an unscheduled vacation (the kids have been threatened by company goons). Appearing on the boardwalk that summer is a motorcycle/animal act owned by a WW I hero, an ex-car-racer named Sture Modig. "The Wall of Death" features a wooden ramp/pit, whirling cycles (ridden by Sture and a younger man—who also is sleeping with Sture's wife) and Tuffy, who rides in a sidecar and is a lion that Sture has had since it was a cub. How the narrator of half the book, Dickie Kettleson, son of the factory worker, finally has a fateful hand in the (disastrous) freeing of Tuffy is the eventual braid here. But you've seen it coming from the beginning, is the problem: the title has given it all away, even: Pride—pride of lions, pride of family, of work, of protectiveness, of bravery. Wharton does try to shadow it a little, with the eerily effective sub-metaphors he's so good at, usually interiors of different kinds: the Wall of Death, sand castles on the beach, the box Dickie keeps his kitten in (who's a minor Tuffy, all too obviously)—but the main man/lion contrast rolls ponderously over all that (Wharton even interweaves a chapter on the behavior of lions in the wild—in case someone's been napping). The inertness of the theme will in the end completely stave in the book, allowing it little of Birdy's or Dad's plain mysteriousness. Still and all, Wharton remains the contemporary novelist perhaps closest to what could be called Frank Capra-style American storytelling: class-conscious, do-an-honest-job, optimistic, loving. Pride, like all his other books, is imbued by these merits—and is scuttled only by its urge to italicize it all unnecessarily.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1985
ISBN: 1557042594
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1985
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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