Nimble prose and an ironic but not smart-alecky stance keep this story moving along nicely—a promising start.
A post-postmodern rock ’n’ roll novel, entertaining and surprisingly elegant.
The title notwithstanding, the tutelary spirit of this suicide-rich novel is not Sylvia Plath but David Foster Wallace, to whom debut novelist Altschul owes the judicious use of the sometimes parodic footnote. Both drink from the well of Gravity’s Rainbow, but there’s a lot of sly reference to the everyday pop culture and the vernacular of our times along with all the learned literariness, as when the book’s heroine, young Calliope Bird Morath, takes on Charlie Rose (“Wow. You don’t waste any time, do you?”), and when their travels find some of the dramatis personae on a Garpian book tour (“Books! All this attention to books! Not politicians, not teenybopper pop-stars, not that dreadful Brad Pitt: a writer…I was so excited, it was all I could do not to strip naked and run around Courthouse Square.”). As if that were not enough, underlying it all is the lovely framework of The Odyssey. The story opens with Calliope’s recounting the suicide of her father, a famous punk rocker, and the devastating effect of the death on her mother, herself perhaps descended from rock royalty—though not, as rumor has it, “illegitimate offspring of a groupie and the drummer of the MC5.” But did Dad really leave the planet? Calliope, a silent songbird who slowly finds her expression, come adolescence, in brittle poetry, thinks not, as she tells the perplexed, aforementioned Rose; likening herself to Telemachus and her mother to Penelope, she sets off on a strange quest to find him among the lotus-eaters. The footnotes fly, the pop-culture references and allusions (Kim Deal, Beavis and Butthead, the collected works of Dave Eggers) come ever faster, and Calliope makes her way through the world, her tale narrated by both herself and a not-so-omniscient, inquisitive author who relies on eavesdropping and other subterfuge to come by his information—a modern trope if ever there was one.
Nimble prose and an ironic but not smart-alecky stance keep this story moving along nicely—a promising start.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-15-101484-2
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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