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
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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