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EMPTY BENCHES

Name: EMPTY BENCHES
Author: Charles Karian
ISBN: 978-1468146288

by Charles Karian ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 2012

True Americana but lacking vitality.

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Karian (Leap of Faith, 2011) delivers this terse novella, a mediation on heartland values as lived by a group of friends.

Young Len is coasting his way through the summer working for his uncle’s lumber company when his delivery route brings him to Golden Manufacturing, a specialty-bench shop in its twilight. There he meets Chant, the last of the once-proud collection of woodworkers who populated the shop. The youngster’s curiosity is piqued, and Chant indulges him with some reminiscences. Out come old photos, mostly of the softball team that filled the workers’ after hours, and the reader meets each of the ball players who once made the Golden Warriors great. These thorough backgrounds fill the remaining chapters, following the men’s lives through school, wars, marriage, work and the baseball field. Still, though Karian painstakingly details his characters, the reader is kept at bay. There’s a persistent sensation of looking through someone else’s photo album, of having scant access to their memories. The novella’s world follows a romantic pattern, and while values like hard work, dependability, generosity and patriotism energize the stories, it becomes hard to find much individuality in the characters. Momentous occasions are somehow all alike, so that what is said of one character’s relationship—“It was not a question of would they get married [but when] they would”—could as easily be grafted to another’s. One almost comes to suspect that the book could have centered on any other party at Jocko’s, the Italian restaurant that serves as a frequent setting, without altering its core. Though we can trace each character’s history, they remain strangers. An abrupt ending, errant punctuation and redundancy—we learn of Chant’s advanced age three times within the span of a paragraph—distract from this well-intentioned project that doesn’t quite manage to hit the ball out of the park.

True Americana but lacking vitality.

Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2012

ISBN: 978-1468146288

Page Count: 52

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: May 11, 2012

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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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.