A superficial, verbose account of a problematic relationship.
Two writers cautiously inch toward love in this Israeli university teacher’s sluggish first novel, following the collection Housebroken (2001).
Yonatan Luria, 45, lives in Tel Aviv with his ten-year-old daughter Dana. His wife Ilana died five years before in a car accident. Since then Yonatan has written only a few pages, though he has a reputation based on two earlier novels about love. Money’s not a problem; Ilana’s rich American parents continue to send regular checks. Yonatan’s eventual partner, 36-year-old Shira Klein, saw her first novel top the bestseller list, but that was three years ago. She too has writer’s block. Shira is unmarried, though she has had affairs. She doesn’t make things easy for herself; if men are either “very smart or not enough,” out come her claws. Yonatan, who considers himself an excellent lover, has been celibate for years, though women are always hitting on him. These two difficult people, lonely, restless and self-hating, meet over dinner at a mutual friend’s house. He wants me, he wants me not, muses Shira. She wants me, she wants me not, muses Yonatan. Just do it, begs the reader, but their first kiss will not come until past the halfway point, and it will be another 100 pages before a joint declaration of love. Meanwhile, Dana is experiencing preadolescent anxieties, and Shira’s retired father Max is slowly dying. Hedaya provides context through glimpses of Tel Aviv life, but she does not have the alchemy to invest the mundane with significance. Towards the end, as Yonatan begins teaching in Jerusalem, attention shifts to Shira’s vigil for Max. That’s unfortunate, for the love relationship could use closer examination after Yonatan’s university gig exposes him as a supreme narcissist, thrilled that his students are more interested in him than in Faulkner, his ostensible subject.
A superficial, verbose account of a problematic relationship.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-7348-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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