An almost charming hero and a vivid sense of small-town life, but the story fails to make a true claim on the reader’s...
A pallid first novel chronicles a year in the life of a desultory college grad, startled into taking his life seriously by a perhaps racially motivated murder.
Working part-time for his father at the local newspaper in Little Falls, their small upstate New York hometown, aimless 27-year-old Lamar spends his days indifferently rewriting stories from larger papers, lazily typing up community bulletins, and intermittently grieving for his dying mother. He dates Glori, a secretary at the elementary school, but their relationship also lacks focus. Boyhood friend Andrew proposes leaving town to work as guards at the penitentiary, and at about the same time jeweler Mark Ramirez goes missing. While he paid little attention to Mark, the only Puerto Rican student when they were both in high school, Lamar does not consider himself a racist, though he acknowledges the backwardness of Little Falls. The police chief, his father’s cousin, is a xenophobe with a penchant for a little brutality to keep things lively, and another relation is in jail for burning down the home of an African-American family. Lamar takes to the road to escape the ordinariness of his life, goes fishing with Andrew, and sees a migrant worker die. Cathartically changed, he resolves to become a “person of substance” after declining to help the Ramirez family solve the mystery of Mark’s disappearance. He proposes marriage to Glori, who has finally tired of his personal blandness, starts working with gusto at the paper, and in some way recovers his sense of direction. After Ramirez is found to have been murdered by a white man, Lamar decides racism wasn’t the problem after all.
An almost charming hero and a vivid sense of small-town life, but the story fails to make a true claim on the reader’s attention—especially when the painstakingly elaborated racial theme dissolves at the end into vapid irrelevancy.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100810-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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