A lackluster modern love story by the author of Relative Sins (1992). ``Oh, God, it's you,'' moans badly wounded Detective Lieutenant Carlin Squire as she looks up, half-conscious, from the operating table at Mercy Hospital to see trauma surgeon Ben Dameroff. Flashback to 1966 and Westerfield, N.Y., a depressed town not far from Albany. Ben and Carlin are two smart kids from the projects, antagonists at first, who grow up to be lovers. But the course of true love never runs smooth, especially if your families are dysfunctional and your parents' dreams haven't come true. When Ben's sister Natasha discovers that their mother and Carlin's dad are having an affair, she plays a prank that kills one and cripples the other. Ben and Carlin each blame the other's parent and split up. He goes on to become a surgeon, working his way through school playing poker; she wins a scholarship to Harvard, then becomes a police detective, called Cambridge by the other cops. He's very handsome and has lovers. She's very successful and lives with a philandering British fashion photographer. Natasha becomes a supermodel and marries a world-famous film director. Everyone lives in New York City. Ben and Carlin come together again, only to be separated when Natasha murders the villain, another Westerfield alumnus, who has been blackmailing her into sordid, dehumanizing sex. The plot resolves sadly, then happily. Ben and Carlin, true survivors, travel upstate for a family funeral, reunite, and vow undying devotion. Victor examines the ways that parents help or hurt their children's futures; filial loyalty and disappointment make up the truest parts of her narrative, but the bulk of it is fairly lifeless, even for a genre in which no one is looking for an excess of novelty. The Platters did it better. (Literary Guild alternate selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-84981-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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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