A disjointed oddity, well below Lehrer’s best work.
The prolific author (No Certain Rest, 2002, etc.) and PBS anchor takes two lunatic asylum inmates for protagonists in his quirky latest.
The Somerset asylum in Missouri is a nightmarish snake pit: the attendants subdue the patients with baseball bats, and the doctors covet their charges’ brains for research. In 1918, a humane physician, Will Mitchell, saves the life of Josh—mute by day, a screamer at night—and later effects a cure by having him talk about his special interest, the Centralia massacre of Union soldiers in 1864. For reasons we don’t learn until later, Josh can’t be released, but in 1933 he takes under his wing a new inmate, Birdie, fresh from witnessing the Union Station massacre in Kansas City. The young man is quick to mimic Josh’s former symptoms, and after Birdie is caught in the library stacks with a female volunteer, Josh helps him escape. The two men catch the Flying Crow to Union Station, which dazzles Josh with its splendor. He has pressing reasons to return to Somerset, but Birdie, though loath to lose his protector, will live at the station for 64 years before being rousted from his hideaway by a Kansas City cop, Randy Benton. The narrative jumps around among 1918, 1933, and 1997 as Randy unravels the mystery of Birdie and Josh. Lehrer’s 14th outing is powered by barely compatible interests: two historical massacres, the inhumane treatment of mental patients, and the era when railroads were king and stations were palaces. The lurid details of asylum life and the massacres overshadow Birdie and Josh, while the author’s keen nostalgia for the glory days of railroading assorts well with neither. Though Josh and his double-layered secret are accounted for, Birdie remains an enigma, an attractive, adventurous young man with possible Mob connections (we don’t know for sure) who grows deaf to everything save the siren song of Union Station.
A disjointed oddity, well below Lehrer’s best work.Pub Date: May 18, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6197-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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