A spellbinding road trip.
A man and his buddy’s corpse journey through the South and its musical legacy in this novel.
It’s 1978, and washed-up folk singer Jim Logan is hanging out in New Orleans with his friend and one-time guitar partner Tom Parrish when Tom up and dies. Fulfilling a promise, Jim sticks Tom in a pine coffin, loads him into a 1951 Ford Country Squire station wagon, and sets out to drive him to Richmond, Virginia, for an improvised burial—all the while pursued by lowlifes in a Chrysler who want to retrieve a valuable diamond Tom swallowed before he died. That’s all the plot device needed to propel this luxurious shaggy dog story onward as Jim drives the back roads, observes the world passing by, and reminisces about his past, goaded by mellow conversational interjections from the voice of Tom’s ghost. The loose-jointed tale unfolds in episodic chapters, almost stand-alone short stories, that introduce Jim to people and places with a musical resonance. He visits the grave of a Delta bluesman; bestows his guitar on a poor boy; gives a ride to a woman in red singing a mysterious song; tours the Shiloh battlefield and discovers a Union soldier’s letter home describing the music of runaway slaves; and visits Elvis Presley’s birthplace, finding it a site of brisk commerce and heartbroken recollections for fans of the King. Jim also meets Chilly Antone, the once-well-known Senator of Western Swing, lobbying to get into the Country Music Hall of Fame; buys a banjo from a hillbilly luthier; spends an afternoon with an old flame; and drinks with other women, hard-boiled and softhearted, in various bars where honky-tonk jukebox soundtracks play in the background. Heslin’s (The Collapse of the Broadway Central, 2018) atmospheric yarn is less a linear narrative than a collection of character studies, landscapes, and soundscapes tied together by Jim’s ruminations on his own and the nation’s souls. It takes in an America of small-town cafes featuring seen-it-all waitresses, stolid national park rangers putting a wholesome face on the bloody chaos of the past, and the ceaseless current of traffic on highways washing past an archipelago of gas stations, set to the ubiquitous sound of pop, rock, and country and braying AM disk jockeys. The author skillfully evokes all these varied voices, from washerwomen to drunken sailors to prim grandmothers, in vignettes that are by turns pungent, funny, melancholy, and wistful, all rendered in a wonderfully impressionistic vernacular that brings to mind a blend of Faulkner and Kerouac. (“In the middle of a thunderstorm, smack inside the corporate limit of Burma Shave, you pick up Bessie Smith and you think you must be drifting off, there’s been no broadcast since the chicken and cornbread at Pep’s Missing Link Cafe, forty miles or so, but there she is, courtesy of a handful of watts somewhere, there she is on the outskirts of winter wheat with the victrola in her voice and your tank more full than empty.”) It’s not always clear where Jim and Tom are headed, but readers who like superb prose and compelling characters will be happy to ride along.
A spellbinding road trip.Pub Date: May 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-941138-92-2
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Three Knolls Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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