Exhilarating: like a good run in bad weather.
Novelist and essay-writer McGuane (Nothing But Blue Skies, 1992; The Longest Silence, 1999; etc.) assembles a large cast for a small but satisfying story about crazies, their keepers, and their victims in his beloved and beguiling Montana.
Through his nastily manipulative last will and testament, the late Sunny Jim Whitelaw continues to torment the family he drove round the bend. In order to cash out of the pop-bottling business Jim’s son-in-law Paul Crusoe is speedily running into the ground, Whitelaw’s will requires his hard-riding daughter Evelyn to end her separation from the sexy but wildly unsteady Paul. Failing that reconciliation, the heirs will all be required to live off the shrinking soda-pop profits that Paul seems hell-bent on eliminating altogether. There is considerable pressure on Evelyn from sister Natalie, who needs plenty of cash if she is to shuck her nerdy but managerially competent husband Stuart, and from Jim’s widow Alice, who wants to go on an Alaskan cruise and then live a nice life now that her tomcatting husband is safely buried. But Evelyn is already leading a nice life, thank you. Regardless of her marriage, the will cuts her into her father’s ranch where she takes lessons in horsemanship, cattle management, and rustic stoicism from manager and WWII sailor Bill Champion. And, no matter how good in bed Paul may be, Evelyn sees no point in taking back a man who is carrying on with his probate officer. Paul’s probation follows a term in the state pen awarded for manslaughter when a drunk Sunny Jim ran into a motorcyclist and Paul politely took the rap, even though his father-in-law had stolen his kidney. These awfully stretched story lines wander perilously close to Florida baroque, but McGuane always knows when to back off and bring in the horses, snow, scenery, and brief moments of sanity to show the real and deeply appealing selves of Evelyn and her manly rancher role model Bill and all that excellent Big Sky country.
Exhilarating: like a good run in bad weather.Pub Date: May 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-679-44674-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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