A butler recounts his service to an egomaniacal businessman who runs for president.
Billy Baxter’s mother runs a modest grocery store, which supports a family life he seemed to find unfulfilling from an early age. One day, Harrison Helm III, an obviously wealthy man, pulls up to the store in a luxury car looking to refill the tank and takes an interest in Billy. Harrison eventually invites Billy to come work on his mother’s vast estate, referred to as Valhalla, as a full-time footman who lives on the grounds. After years of dedicated service, Billy ascends to the position of head butler and ends up toiling at Valhalla for 22 years. He cultivates a friendly rapport with Mrs. Helm, but upon her death, he resigns his position and accepts a new one as butler for the estate’s new owner, Vincent V. Victor. Victor is a notoriously crass but extraordinarily rich businessman, and many see him as an opportunistic oligarch who represents the worst of American capitalism. The parallels between Victor and Donald Trump are clearly intended: Victor, a bestselling author of business books, creates an NBC special called The Great American Breast Contest, a hilarious spoof of the televised Miss America pageant. Reviled for his shady business tactics, he runs for president on a rhetorically bombastic platform that promises to revitalize America through trade protectionism and the cessation of illegal immigration. He circulates conspiracy theories, denounces the evils of political correctness, and runs against an opponent he mockingly refers to as “Flopping Sally.” Leamer (The Lynching, 2016, etc.) deftly charts the arc of Billy’s life from vulgar poverty to aristocratically civilized wealth to an unusual combination of the two. The principal strength of the work is the elegant first-person narration Billy provides; the entire book is presented as his memoir. Billy’s gimlet-eyed observations display remarkable restraint, typically withholding judgment, and his peculiar life experience is itself a kind of master tutorial in the nuances of American class. Despite its heavy reliance on the imitation of current affairs, this work is an impressively inventive tale, with considerable wisdom to boot. A fictional dramatization of America’s current presidential race, skillfully rendered.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-76574-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Foggy Bottom Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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