Riotously funny from the start, the sharp edge of the author’s satire turns this tale into something very different from...
A deft, funny, and ultimately quite moving debut about the strenuous and determined efforts of a young Irish aristocrat to evade all contact with the real world.
Beneath a thick veneer of upper-class insouciance, Charles Hythloday is beset with problems on every side. He’s a world-class drunk, a university dropout, an involuntary celibate, a spendthrift, a dreamer, and a great big baby. He’s also on the verge of bankruptcy, a fact that he prefers to ignore but is being forced, slowly and reluctantly, to confront. The son of a cosmetics mogul who died a few years back and left his family a mountain of debt administered by a shady offshore bank, Charles (now 24) has never had a job and spends his days and nights roaming the house and grounds of his ancestral estate outside Dublin, methodically drinking the cellar dry and watching old Gene Tierney movies on TCM. His sister Bel has recently finished acting school and intrudes upon Charles’s arcadia by bringing home a succession of boorish young men whose unfathomable accents and indescribable attire provide vivid proof of the depth of her nostalgie de la boue. Her latest beau, a junk dealer named Frank, arrives on the scene just as a succession of household objects begins to disappear on an almost daily basis. His suspicions aroused, Charles hires a private detective (actually, he’s just a drunken postman) to set a trap for Frank—but the truth turns out to be stranger and more horrible than Charles had imagined. Eventually, Charles is forced to leave his little Brideshead and make his way in the world—which turns out to be just as appalling as he feared. For Bel, the consequences of her family’s decline are different but even more tragic. Modern Ireland, in Murray’s telling, would seem to have little room for grace or beauty—but, then again, Yeats was making the same complaint in 1916.
Riotously funny from the start, the sharp edge of the author’s satire turns this tale into something very different from comedy by the end and reveals Murray as a master of narrative sleight of hand.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6116-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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