Has the world gone mad? Has Josh? Or has Goldstein?
It’s helpful that the title page characterizes this debut volume by NPR and magazine writer Goldstein as “(A Novel),” for otherwise the reader might be even more perplexed by the assortment of bite-sized vignettes, observations and non-sequiturs that challenges categorization.
Even the agile mind of the late Lenny Bruce (who receives the briefest of name checks here) would have difficulty determining what to make of this. The elliptical narrative was first published in 2001 in Canada, where the Brooklyn-born author lives. The anti-plot features a nondescript protagonist named Josh who works at a fast-food dive called Burger Zoo. Josh’s father is Chick. Josh’s mother is Frieda. Frieda is sick. Or dying. Or dead. Josh’s narrative makes such leaps of chronology and consciousness that just when the reader has determined that Frieda has died, she returns to life. Josh has a best friend named Kaliotzakis. Josh also has a series of girlfriends, though except for the changes of names as they come and go from these pages, it’s difficult to distinguish them. Josh has a rabbi with messianic aspirations who sells something called Kosher-style Love Lotion. The Love Lotion appears to be more repugnant than seductive. Sex is only one of the bodily functions that obsesses Josh. Maybe Josh has no inner life or maybe all he has is an inner life. Maybe all of this meandering is a meditation on consciousness, or connectedness, or time as it operates within the Mobius strip of the mind. Maybe it’s designed to subvert every expectation of narrative progression and character development, as if those who perceive life and art in such linear fashion haven’t recognized that the illusion of linearity is itself a trick of the mind. On occasion, Josh disappears, replaced by the first-person narration of “I.” Whether or not Josh is “I” doesn’t seem to mean more than anything else within this random, seemingly arbitrary assemblage of paragraphs.
Has the world gone mad? Has Josh? Or has Goldstein?Pub Date: March 31, 2006
ISBN: 1-58243-347-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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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