Beautiful Kate

by Newton Thornburg

Wanted as a material witness in a drug-smuggling case, Greg Kendall is hiding out at his family’s old Chicago home. While there, he finds himself thinking about his long dead siblings, older brother Cliff and twin sister Kate. The two died in a car crash years before, and as Greg revisits and relives the memories of his childhood, he awakens long-buried secrets from the family’s past—including memories of his relationship with his twin that were better left undisturbed.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Family, Classics

230 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Born in Harvey, Illinois, Thornburg graduated from the University of Iowa with a Fine Arts degree. He worked in a variety of jobs before devoting himself to writing full-time (or at least in tandem with his cattle farm in the Ozarks) in 1973.
His 1976 novel Cutter and Bone was filmed in 1981 as Cutter's Way. The New York Times called Cutter and Bone "the best novel of its kind for ten years." Another novel-to film Beautiful Kate was filmed in Australia in 2009 and starred Bryan Brown and Ben Mendelsohn. It was directed by Rachel Ward, who is Bryan Brown's real-life wife.
Thornburg died on May 9, 2011, a few days shy of his 82nd birthday.

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thornburgh's Beautiful Kate is a mind-blowing clever masterpiece of literary creativity. Somehow evoking things as diverse as Steinbeck's East of Eden, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, and the Doors' LA Woman, this book is an emotionally intense journey into childhood dreams, family tragedies, and bitter failed adulthood. It includes everything from a suave Hollywood couple on the run from the law, an old man determined never again to leave what's left of his home, twins so close that almost nothing could ever tear them apart, guilt ridden journeys,
family estrangement, and more.

It all begins with a return to a childhood home that had all been left behind with family bonds severed by unspeakable tragedy. But what's left there is being consumed by a crime-ridden city, chipped paint, bitter memories.

There are flashbacks to a childhood with inseparable siblings on a huge ranch, playing tricks on neighbors, dipping in the pond. And bitterness taking root through teenage years as earth-shattering circumstances ripped the family asunder.

Incredible writing fills this story with raw emotion even as it touches on taboo subjects. What an incredible literary achievement.

[Bren fall in love with the sea. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I have been back all of three days now, back in my father's house. So where else would I find myself at this moment but alone upstairs in the old bedroom sitting at the old desk, Bic in hand, trying to exorcise the same demons that drove me out of here in the first place, at the fearless age of eighteen".

Beautiful Kate by Newton Thornburg



This is an example of a book to savor.


I read this quite awhile ago and never forgot it. It is a story of a young man ruminating on his past. Both his siblings, Kate and Cliff are now dead and the surviving sibling, Gregg, takes us back on a journey through time as he relives his childhood growing up with his two siblings and then getting deep into tragedy and dysfunction. Not exactly a happy story I must warn.

I guess this would be described as literary fiction. I saw another reviewer say it was "unlike anything they had read before" and it's true. The book also goes extremely slowly but in this case I found it to be a good thing. This is more of a "slow burn" and it isn't where the book goes, it's about the journey along the way.

I also do not always like books that switch from the present to the past but this book did it seamlessly. There is an element of such sadness throughout the whole story, I think you do have to be in a certain mood to read it.

I found Beautiful Kate to be an incredible piece of writing but it is very unsettling and one should not go in and expect light reading. I have heard there is a film version but I've yet to see it.

4.5 stars. Great writing.

[Jayakrishnan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great empires crumble due to excessive debauchery. Petronius' Satyricon was an account of sexual debauchery in ancient Rome. Sexual debauchery may destroy big farming families in the prosperous American empire too. In Newton Thornburg's Beautiful Kate, an incestuous love triangle involving a pair of twins and the older brother leads to terrible violence and death among the Kendalls, an old farming family in Illinois.

Greg Kendall, a playboy Hollywood writer returns to his childhood farmhouse with his beautiful girlfriend Toni. They are on the run from the police after Greg's yacht (received as a divorce settlement from his wealthy ex-wife Ellen) explodes with a coke-dealer, his crew and Columbian marijuana on it. Greg is wanted as a material witness. The plan is to hideout at the farmhouse where he grew up. Greg's father Jason Cutter (hmmm!) Kendall, a cranky ex-senator, his gay younger brother Junior and sister Sarah, a lonely schoolteacher still live in the two-story farmhouse.

Life in the farmhouse is not exactly tranquil. He discovers that the whole family including his once fierce senator father is now in a state of retreat because the streets and their own barn house are now controlled by their poor black neighbours. Junior, Greg's younger brother has some fragile agreement with the local black thugs under which he lets them use the family barn house and in return, the thugs do not burn down the two-story farmhouse where the family lives. Junior also carries on with some young black kid which lands him in trouble with the kid's father.

Greg, who was once a rabble rouser in the town, accepts the new social arrangement:

“Walking—and especially walking along the beach—is something I have sorely missed since leaving California. Often, when I was sharing a house at Malibu, I used to walk all the way to Sunset before turning back, a distance of at least six miles, much of it decorated with the most beautiful female bodies in the western world, which may have had something to do with my remarkable stamina. Here, though, one can’t help taking into consideration the fact that being alone on foot often means being a lone white man among hostile blacks, usually kids, who just might want something you have, like your life. Which brings to mind as I write this one of Ellen’s better lines, tossed off as we drifted down the Harbor Freeway through Watts in the cool hush of her Rolls Silver Cloud: Cowardice doth made liberals of us all.”

Greg confines himself to his upstairs room and begins to pen a memoir of his childhood, involving his relationship with Kate, his beautiful feisty twin sister and Cliff, the strait-laced church going older brother. If this novel were a crime thriller, Kate would have been one of the most insidious femme fatales ever, turning brother against brother, desperately trying to keep the three of them locked into the triangle by deliberately sabotaging her own chances with other men because her brothers are the only men she can carry on with. The following conversation between Kate and her father after she refuses to deliver the valedictory speech, despite topping the class, offers a glimpse into Kate’s wilful nature:

“I don’t believe in all that upbeat patriotic junk,” she said at dinner. “And if I told them what I did believe, they’d hang me.”

Jason was apoplectic. “And just what beliefs are those, young lady?”

“Well, let me think,” she said, with a show frown. “How about this? The race is to the swift. And the rest might as well not even bother.”

Beautiful Kate is a saga of an ageing writer, on an unexpected and spiritually fortuitous break from his normal life, sequestered in his childhood home with the ghosts of the past and his pen, looking back on his life and the events that shaped him.

“….. I did have the door locked as I lay there in the dark, smoking and listening to the sounds of the night. Somewhere in the distance I could hear the trumpeting of a bull in rut, one of the most fearsomely beautiful sounds in all of nature, yet not fearsome enough that night to prevail against the sound of the township’s hotrodders on Reardon Road, measuring each other’s manhood in calibrations of squealing rubber and roaring metal. At midnight the grandfather clock in the living room chimed a peaceful and harmonious end to what had been a discordant day, but for me the sounds of the night went on: the scratching of mice in the walls and the sibilant rustle of elm leaves in the wind and then that most mysterious of all sounds, the one that dwells only in silence, that soft rushing beating thing I can only conceive to be the flowing of time or of one’s own blood.”

Despite the tragedy and violence at its center, Beautiful Kate is funny, memorable, affecting and cozy in a way only American novels about decline and squalor can be. There is an Australian film based on this novel. I don’t think I will watch it.

[Liam · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

[The_raisinet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful Kate is NOT a 'light, breezy' read. It is uncomfortable, painfully so, in certain parts. It is an open wound, being poked at relentlessly every time you read another chapter. It isn't completely horrifying however, it does add a level of humanity to the situation this family and Ned find themselves in, one involving a (in my opinion) crazy Kate.

Kate as a character was sometimes too much for me. The one complain I have about this book is that it didn't offer much insight about Kate herself, didn't offer any reasoning behind her actions. But not every story is ended neatly with a bow on top, I understand.

All in all, definitely a good read. Not the best, but definitely worth a read.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. While it did contain some dark twists and rather shocking moments, it was an overall good read. To give you an idea of the novel's dark undertone, here is Greg describing how he feels about his nostalgic childhood memories before jotting them down on paper: "No, about all I have to do is endure them in memory, as they track through my head, much like random particles of radioactivity. One barely feels himself dying."

Wow.

On a more personal note, this book reminded me of some families I knew in the Midwest. I like to think I have met the best of them and the worst. This book reminded me of the latter. To some extent I felt like I already knew some of these characters, including Kate, who was more accurately dubbed "Crazy Kate" by a previous commenter. This made the book all that more interesting to me.

All in all, I ended up giving this book four stars for being a well written, interesting, and emotionally gripping story.

[Chris Blocker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful Kate is such a difficult book to review. First, the story goes pretty deep into some taboo topics. How does one talk about the merits of an incest story without sounding like a creep? Next, the novel shows off an abundance of racism and homophobia. From the first instance, I was uncomfortable, but I thought it would be relevant to the plot. It wasn't. At all. One could argue that it perhaps helps the reader better define these characters, but no, it doesn't. This was just one more thing to be disgusted by within these pages.

And yet, Beautiful Kate is a tremendously written and riveting tale of family secrets and loyalties, bursting with psychologically-complex characters and so much introspection. The pain of this story feels genuine. This is one of those rare novels that pulls a reader along easily, but provides more complexity than such stories generally provide. I'd like to have been given a better understanding of Kate; her character is so terribly troubled, but she doesn't receive the same narrative attention the rest of her family receives.

Beautiful Kate is a difficult, but sharp and absorbing tale, marred most by a terrible authorial decision to include completely unnecessary hatred.

[Rachel Willis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like nothing I've ever read before.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay, this is a complicated book to review. I loved it, by the way. It all started with the movie (by the same name), which I saw on cable a few weeks ago. Have you ever had an evening in which you were ready to go to bed, started to watch a movie, and then could not tear yourself away? This is precisely what happened, and I had never heard of the book, author, or movie.
Rachel Ward, one of my favorite actresses, produced it. Her husband Bryan Brown, starred in it, along with Rachael Griffiths, another favorite actress. It was set in Australia, and Rachel Ward made some changes from the book for that locale.
Back to the book, I cannot divulge the content as that would spoil the whole thing. Sorry! I think it's more powerful to read the book or watch the movie, having the mind as a clean slate. That being said, I think the movie was even better than the book. Rachel took allowances by taking out some things from the book that didn't work (for instance, the locale being Ohio with a low income housing development on the property. Also, a tree crashing through the roof and that whole part of the book, those were just distractions.) The movie flows more smoothly than the book - kudos to the producer and director. That being said, the book is written beautifully, and I'm so impressed by Thornburg's voice, that I'm going to search for more of his books to read.
It could very well be, that if I had read the book before seeing the movie, my opinions would be reversed. Because of the complicated & unique story, the first thing one reads or watches would be the more powerful of the two.

[Gabriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

As beautifully written and as incredible as this book is, I’d honestly recommend the movie more. It’s basically the best bits of the book, without the unnecessary racism, homophobia or rambling subplots. Which you know obviously characters acting like that doesn’t mean the author actually feels that way, I’m not trying to imply that. But it wasn’t really needed, plus I think the 80s had a big problem with white authors making black characters talk like massive stereotypes. Even Stephen King did this multiple times. But warts and all this book is a borderline masterpiece, despite its very uncomfortable exploration of taboo subjects. It’s a tragic and all encompassing coming of age tale, both for his teen self and his adult self. It’s about one’s reckoning with the past and how things can never truly go back to the way they were, no matter how much you want it. Loved it, but I don’t recommend it. If that makes sense, excited to read Cutter and Bone eventually though.

[David Phillips · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really like Thornburg as an author but, this is the least enjoyable of his books that I have read. I found the narrator unlikeable, the subject matter was very disturbing to the point where I was wondering what Thornburg's motivation was for writing this. The book also had an undercurrent of homophobia and racism that I did not like as it was not relevant to the plot or characters imho.

I finished it because it was Thornburg and I thought he might claw his way out of the hole he had dug...he did not. V disappointing.

[Ivy Blossom · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing is really nice and the book gives us a lot of beautiful quotes, however, some parts left a bad taste in my mouth, such as the homophobia, the racism, the antisemitism and the prejudice against mental illness (Kate is portrayed as 'crazy' and 'mentally unstable'). It played straight with some of the incest tropes, such as the suicide and sad ending, but it did shake up some other things, such as the sister being the one obsessed with the brother.

[Gay Harding · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s been a long time since I read such a thought provoking book. Shocking and disturbing but thoroughly engrossing. The story is written from the perspective of Greg, a screen writer looking back on his life with his family and the harrowing events that brought him to his introspection and his complicated relationship with his sister, brother and father. I really liked Thornburg’s style of writing so will be adding more of his books to my ‘to read’ list.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This piece of literature was exceptionally well written. It never gets confused when the narrative jumps from present to past. If you like this book don’t forget to watch the movie, it’s amazingly well translated to the Australian outback.