CRESCENDO

by Laura Kalpakian ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 17, 1987

Kalpakian's (Beggars and Choosers; These Latter Days) third novel charts love and greed among the Swallows, a contemporary California clan that marries for the wrong reasons. The unfortunate decision of shipping magnate and one-time senator Ebeneezer Swallow to marry the shrewd young widow Lucille Cotton unites his grown children in their disapproval. Much worse, he dies in bed, in flagrante delicto (Lucille is gifted, a former whore), and leaves his considerable fortune to his widow. Son George and daughter Althea get a token sum; favored and incorruptible son Anson, a judge, gets $100,000--better but still a blow. Lucille becomes the enemy of all Swallows. The story is largely seen through the eyes of Anson's daughter Claire, a bundle of competing forces--at varying times wild and decorous, devoted and rebellious, loving and bitchy. The story opens with Claire at 40 rushing to the bedside of her alcoholic gambler husband, Lucky Stone, who has shot himself. Weaving back to the early 1960's, Kalpakian presents Claire at age 19, newly pregnant and seducing the kind, worshipping Lucky Stone so that she can claim him as the inseminator: they marry and produce three sons offstage, and the reader is told that Claire is a good wife for 20 years to the duped and decent Lucky. Back in time, once again, to her college years: Claire's true and secret love was former-whore Lucille's son (by her first husband), the intense, darkly handsome anarchist, Jon Cotton. But pragmatic Claire, needing bourgeois comforts and respectability, left him tending the oppressed in California and went home. It is that decision and the specter of the never-to-be-had Jon that create the book's only tension. A central moral question--where did old Ebeneezer's money come from and why was his honest son Anson haunted by the answer?--does not warrant the symbolism (the stink/stench/smell' of decay) it inspires. Lucky recovers and repents his ways. What does Claire learn from this? That her sin is identical to Lucille's: she equated love with money. Claire needs to be a sympathetic character here, a voice of control, while everyone else is railing against evil, injustice and Lucille. But she is too indignant, too prissy, lo do the job. Kalpakian's writing is sure and intelligent, and her characters are vivid, but the sum of the parts is not a satisfying whole.

Pub Date: April 17, 1987

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1987

Categories: FICTION