Here, more than ever, Adams (Listening to Billie, Beautiful Girl) seems to be dressing up women's-magazine fiction as serious literary work—with some style but little real authority. The lady in romantic disarray this time is 40-year-old Daphne, long-divorced and big-breasted and new to San Francisco—where she's come to be custodian/renovator/decorator in her old chum Agatha's just-purchased house in posh Pacific Heights. (Agatha's late father, a shady General, has left her a fortune.) And Daphne is determined to do without men for a while, since she's "addicted to even the most miserable forms of love": past lover Jake was a junkie; recent lover Derek is a pig; only Jean-Paul of Paris, her adulterous love of long ago, was a sweetie (not to mention "the beautiful unforgettable shape of his cock"), but she let him get away—and now he's a "leading Socialist economic theorist." Still, Daphne, who has made "a career out of personal relationships," does let herself get somewhat emotionally involved. She has sexy fantasies about "beautiful" carpenter Tony—who turns out, alas, to be a sometime homosexual prostitute. She meets the Houston family: handsome blond Royce (who'll have an affair with physician Agatha), dark wife Ruth (who'll temporarily go mad), wool-sculptor Caroline (who'll turn lesbian), flaky son Whitey (who'll beat up Caroline and then go off to Alaska to get killed in a fight). And finally Daphne will discover that old flame Jean-Paul is teaching at Berkeley—so there's a Clairol-commercial reunion ("We praised and blessed each other, for everything") with a happy fadeout. . . though J-P may have a terminal disease. What does all this add up to? Very little, despite an attempt to relate Daphne's "emotional temperature-taking" to "the proliferation of violence" in the 1970s (not only the Houston family, but also a possible link between Agatha's money and the murder of Chile's Allende!)—an awkward stab at metaphor even less convincing than the use of Billie Holliday in Listening to Billie. Nor does Daphne's narrative strongly engage on the simplest storytelling level: the supporting cast remains faceless (partly because of Adams' limited-vocabulary obsession with "beautiful" people); there's no tension, despite heavy foreshadowing throughout; and Adams seems never to have decided whether archly self-centered narrator Daphne is a character or just a generalized alter ego. Painless—but the thinnest work yet from an initially alluring, superficially polished, increasingly banal and repetitive writer.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1980
ISBN: 0449146529
Page Count: 195
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1980
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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