Lyrical, sometimes difficult, and engaging—an allusive, sidelong view of Chinese history by a writer who has seen many of...
A family epic—originally published in China in 1998—that winds its way across generations of Chinese history, not always coherently.
Transport Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo across the Pacific, and you have some sense of the setting for Xiaobin’s allegorical, sometimes fantastical novel. It opens on a curious note, as young Yushe, sensible and sensitive, undergoes a lobotomy so that, her mother insists, she might “preserve the girl’s mental health and allow her to live out the rest of her life as a normal person.” Fortunately for the development of the novel, Yushe seems little worse for the wear, while her two sisters—two, naturally, being the requisite number of sisters in a fairy tale—have travails of different kinds. Xiaobin, a writer in her mid-50s who has published several books in the People’s Republic of China, sets Yushe’s adventures and misadventures against a broad canvas that begins at the end of the 19th century and the last years of the Qing Dynasty and that ends at the turn of the present century. As the tale moves across five generations, it is not always entirely clear where in time it is, and the Western reader may be challenged in keeping its 26 major characters and many more minor ones sorted out. (The dramatis personae at the end of the book is of some help.) Punctuating the text are closely observed scenes, as when one character, shot down by police, notices a car driving away “like a soaring bird whose flapping wings stirred up the filth and dust as it flew off through the still night.” More typical, though, are rather surrealistic moments—involving, in one instance, steamy sex without regard for the fine distinctions of gender but with inventive use of flowers—and aoristic, dreamlike episodes, the better, it appears, to disguise the author’s only partly subtle critique of the Chinese state at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Lyrical, sometimes difficult, and engaging—an allusive, sidelong view of Chinese history by a writer who has seen many of its darker moments.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8380-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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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