Leland (Professor of Aesthetics, 1993, etc.) offers a reprise of the angst and anxieties of the last two decades when three disparate but representative characters look back as the body of a longtime friend is brought home to be buried. Taking place in the days before and after the funeral of Bobbo Starwick, missing in Vietnam for nearly 30 years, three people interweave memories of him with accounts of their own lives since he disappeared. Belva, who was Bobbo's first lover in high school, and Fred, a fellow Vietnam vet and Bobbo's high-school friend, still live in Rhymer's Creek, West Virginia. Barry, the third member of the trio, is Bobbo's gay half-brother, who fled the town 20 years ago for New York. Bobbo was one of those golden boys whom everybody loves: the perfect brother, friend, and lover. But something happened to him in Vietnam. Fred, who saw him there, observed the change, as did his parents when they met him in Hawaii: The war had taken over and Bobbo had become a ferocious killer. Fred himself has never recovered from the war: He can't hold down a job, is troubled by nightmares and, by the day of the funeral, is so undone by memories of the war that he has to be hospitalized. Businesswoman Belva, wanting something more out of life, hitched up with a rich classmate from Tennessee, but the marriage soon broke down and she married safe and dependable Wallace, who doesn't seem to know that she's had numerous lovers over the years. Barry, who has become a photographer famous for his Mapplethorpe-like shots, recalls his antiwar activities in college, his coming-out in New York, and the loss of the only man he has loved to AIDS. With Bobbo laid to rest, the three finally find some peace of their own. All the highs and lows of those times, revisited by a trio who seem more like stock figures than the scar-bearing bereaved.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-944072-69-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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