Heller’s first is a smart take on hoary subjects—Jewish deracination, the moral vileness of Hollywood—that nevertheless offers real pleasures and marks the writer as one to watch. Willy Muller has a lot on his plate, but all of it is bitter food. He was a journalist on British television until something ghastly happened back in 1971: his alcoholic and fiercely unhappy wife, in a drunken argument, slipped, hit her head on the fridge, and died. Thus Willy was not only left with his two young daughters, Sophie and Sadie, but his TV career ended fast when the tabloids exploited him as a wife murderer who got off easy. Things were made no better—except financially—when Willy published a hugely successful memoir (To Have and to Hold) revealing everything about his marriage but exonerating himself. Was it honest? Well, ten years later Sophie’s confusion, doubt, and rage about her father have driven her to sex, drugs, and a miserably shabby marriage, while the younger Sadie, though not married, has had a baby of her own—and has just committed suicide. Imagine the torment Willy goes through (he now lives in L.A.) as he reads through Sadie’s journals, wrestles with his guilt, and tries to make a grotesquely distorted screenplay of To Have and to Hold for the sleazy movie moguls who see a sure killing in it. Toss in a heart attack, an attempt to quit smoking, plenty of troubles on the sexual front, and a trip to Mexico to —write— that brings Willy face to face with the rich, glib, hyper-Teutonic Hans Stempel, director-to-be of the new movie—and one of the catalysts that suddenly turns the half-Jewish Willy completely around and sends him back to England to try—one way or another—to do things over again. Willy’s caustic, witty voice (cockroaches walk around —like ambulatory patent leather handbags—) keeps his mournful tale sturdily on course and safely protected from the maudlin.
Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40724-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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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