An ambitious portrait of a bittersweet contemporary marriage with a particularly contemporary problem, but the impact,...
In this elegant but disconcertingly episodic novel, a husband pessimistic about Earth's future resists his wife's pleas to commit to their union by having children.
As in her first book, Now You See It (1991), Nixon examines her protagonists’ lives in a sequence of interrelated stories that cumulatively should compose a novel. The result, though, is an awkward hybrid that never fully illuminates the marriage of violinist Margy and microbiologist Webster. Individual chapters are too self-contained to satisfactorily cohere into a full-length whole. Characters appear once, like the school friends in “Women Come and Go,” then never return. The narrative hopscotches through the years ahead, leaving long stretches of time unaccounted for. In college, Margy sleeps with WASP Henry, but he breaks it off when she learns she’s pregnant, and in “A Solo Performance,” Margy has an abortion. Cut to “Season of Sensuality” in Venice, where Margy is vacationing with a fellow member of the Chicago Symphony, trying to get over an affair with an abusive pianist. Next, in “After the Beep,” she spends a summer house-sitting in Bolinas, a coastal village in California where she meets Webster, who feels so passionately about Native Americans, the environment, and Caucasians’ depredations that he has taken an Indian name and given up ``white man's time, the telephone and news, hamburgers and pizza, everything that came in plastic.'' As he works on his dissertation, the two fall in love and marry; Webster moves to Chicago. Married life brings its usual conflicts: Webster finds Margy extravagant and wasteful, while she is often irked by his fanaticism (he won’t even kill a housefly). But as Margy's biological clock ticks away, the biggest point of contention becomes Webster's refusal to have children.
An ambitious portrait of a bittersweet contemporary marriage with a particularly contemporary problem, but the impact, unfortunately, is blunted by the elliptical format.Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-58243-062-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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