An insightful, unconventional, and risqué view of present-day culture.
In Cook’s (American Rococo, 2017, etc.) satirical novel, a 55-year-old university professor time travels to the ancient past and a dystopian future.
One day in 2015, Jeff Malmquist, a semiotics instructor, is teaching a class in Illinois when he suddenly and inexplicably finds himself in New Gary, Indiana—45 years in the future. In this year, America is gun-obsessed and fearful of a “looming pedophile menace”; as a result, AR-15s are in the hands of teenagers, citizens freely wield assault weapons and kill each other, and innocent people are shipped off to labor camps. When someone gives him a gun, Malmquist blacks out and finds himself in New Rome, China, where there is a slave population of Italians; it appears that China is becoming a superpower that will eventually run the world. The professor then sees what the United States is like under Chinese rule after he jumps another 100 years further into the future. Later, he time travels back to ancient Rome, as well. For readers, the various timelines aren’t always easy to follow; most of the story is told in dialogue, which results in a great deal of unnatural exposition. This, in turn, creates a disorienting effect that somewhat mimics Malmquist’s constant uneasiness with time travel. Overall, this is a challenging and discomfiting book, and the satirical humor gets buried underneath its heavy-handed depiction of society’s shortcomings. What the novel has to say about language, however, is poignant; language barriers abound, with dialogue in Cantonese, Italian, and Latin, but Cook isn’t merely interested in verbal language—body language, customs and rituals, and symbols are also on full display. The book also explores Americans’ complicated relationship with sex, juxtaposing it against their seemingly comfortable relationships with weapons and violence.
An insightful, unconventional, and risqué view of present-day culture.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9984133-5-8
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Magic Theater Books
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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