It’s good to have these essential novels in one place. One wishes only that McMurtry had provided more commentary; his...
Omnibus collection containing the esteemed Texas author’s first three novels, a loose cycle about the people who live hardscrabble lives on the austere, windswept plains of the Red River country.
The first volume in the present collection put McMurtry on the literary map, if, in some eyes, for the wrong reasons. Horseman, Pass By (1961) takes its title from a sharp-edged lyric by William Butler Yeats, importuning the traveler to “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death.” At the dark heart of the sometimes-sensationalized story is the aimless Hud, a cowboy who knows his way around a rope and steer but hasn’t been well socialized; as played by Paul Newman in the movie, he was a sneering ruffian but less sociopathic than McMurtry’s original. McMurtry slyly alludes to the Yeats poem, writing that the rodeo was the biggest thing to hit the tiny, dusty town of Thalia, and “since it all came like Christmas, only once a year, I was careful not to let any of it pass me by.” Leaving Cheyenne (1963), the second novel, pushes the Thalia story back in time but into familiar-for-McMurtry territory: especially in a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business, when two men fall in love with the same woman, hard feelings ensue. “I wish I knew what all was involved in this loving somebody,” says a principal. “Mostly a lot of damn heartbreak, I know that.” There’s heartbreak aplenty for McMurtry’s own agemates in The Last Picture Show (1966), a brilliant evocation of a time and place—and of the confusion that results when, for whatever intent, people start making a game of love. Jane Austen it isn’t, but McMurtry has followed his characters’ fortunes in a succession of sequels, including Texasville (1987) and Rhino Ranch (2009).
It’s good to have these essential novels in one place. One wishes only that McMurtry had provided more commentary; his introduction, lamenting “the myth of my country, and of my people, too,” is frustratingly short and only hints at what he might have done.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63149-375-1
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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