A winsome tale that puts its quirky, rural characters on full display.
Throop’s (Lizard Quest, 2011) second novel delves into the life of the eccentric title character and his equally curious friends and neighbors in a small country town.
When a journalist is told by his editor to leave the city and become a “rural correspondent,” he initially balks at the idea, but financial inducements and curiosity get the better of him. At his assigned destination he meets up with Cletus Jones, a “large, muscular, corn-fed country boy” who begins to tell him about his distant cousin, Wilberforce Jones, a man who’s led a remarkable life. For example, Cletus recounts a time that Wilberforce resolved to commit suicide by contracting food poisoning from local Mexican restaurants; he was dejected by the fact that his domestic partner had left him and because he was in debt from a scheme to win big at bingo. Unsurprisingly, the suicide plan failed, but Wilberforce used the experience to develop a recipe for salsa that became a successful, lucrative brand. Cletus also describes an incident in which Wilberforce became a preacher to a congregation that believed that a young celebrity (with a racy, leaked video) was an avatar of God. But Wilberforce isn’t the only person of interest here: Cletus also tells the story of Dennis Haney and Tad Elliot, two fellow townsfolk who gave a series of lectures denying that NASA astronauts actually landed on the moon, which culminated in a legal showdown. Throughout the novel, Throop manages to keep the many characters and occasionally tangential storylines in clear, comprehensible order. As the primary storyteller, Cletus is as engaging and unusual as any of the people he describes. The author also gives the provincial, but unnamed, town a strong sense of place. His liberal use of rural dialect may be distracting to some readers, however, and although the journalist/narrator is a learned city man, his occasional florid turns of phrase strain believability: “Without any outward show of rancor at my attempted sally of wit, Cletus resumed his story.” Most readers, however, will choose to overlook these minor transgressions and embrace this congenial novel’s charm.
A winsome tale that puts its quirky, rural characters on full display.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-1466397767
Page Count: 174
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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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