Brilliant, frightening and skillfully written.
In this beautifully written debut novel, a loner hides from the world, other people and his past until a chance relationship sends him spiraling toward a confrontation with inner demons and the outside world.
Ben floats, adrift in a world of routine, solitude and ennui. Reminiscent of Sartre’s Nausea (1938), the intimate prose conjures this outsider’s life into stark reality. Readers are thrown drowning into the maelstrom that is his mind—a mind constantly churning, focusing in microscopic detail on every word, deed and nuance. “He tried to think of something more to say. He was supposed to say more. But he couldn’t think of anything, and the weight of saying nothing got heavier and heavier until it was like a panic.” For Ben, life is like a bad acid trip, and Di Biase drags the reader along for the ride. The story is divided between the present and flashbacks in which Ben is referred to as “the boy,” who is as introspective and self-conscious as the man, though somehow fresher, as if things today didn’t have to be this way. In the present, Ben is a mechanic at a Washington, D.C., garage, where co-workers call him Cornpone. “Ben liked working. Not having to think.” He prefers old cars and keeping to himself; at night, he sits at home drinking Maker’s Mark. Sometimes he goes to a bar where patrons call him President Taft. There, he meets Maria, a woman much like his mother. Ben resists but falls into a relationship with her and meets her daughter, Sophia. Throughout, Di Biase builds tension that reverberates and tightens, ever alluding to some unnamed crime Ben committed as a boy. “It might have been different. If he’d turned out differently, or if he hadn’t done what he’d done.” The writing mirrors Ben’s agitated state, infecting readers with his anxiety. Put squarely inside a troubled mind, readers can’t escape the fearsome knowledge that something bad is coming.
Brilliant, frightening and skillfully written.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9895360-9-7
Page Count: 248
Publisher: The Apparent Sublime
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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