Fourth novel from Wilkins (Little Masters, 1997, etc.), about a family that can’t seem to extricate itself from drugs, legal or illegal.
You’re supposed to have more to show for yourself by the time you’re 40 than addiction, prodigal son Jamie Webb thinks. He’s 41, about to head home again to Timaru, on New Zealand’s South Island. There, Jamie’s more reliable brother, Don, has hit something of a rut: “That was more or less how it was with his decisions these days—he decided something and it happened.” Mother Ruth wonders whether it’s her fault the kids never visit: “Perhaps her children didn’t come home because they sensed something else in her, some fearful need she was keeping from them which would be sprung once they moved back in.” But come home Jamie does. He’s a stranger to Ruth, who thinks, even though he looks terrible, that he probably works as a sex entertainer of some kind because his fingernails are clean. Once Jamie’s ensconced in the house, the novel turns into an excursion through family history and New Zealand’s drug culture. It seems that Don isn’t as placid as he first appears; not only does he pop the occasional Halcion, but he’s secretly been dealing drugs in exchange for sexual favors. Wilkins has command of his native settings and straightforward prose, but too often his characters seem no more real than the celebrities he references to place the narrative in time (Tiger Woods, Pamela and Tommy Lee). Of course the plot is headed for violence, blackmail, cops and a courtroom, but not before the stakes for the family are revealed: “Probably it meant Don believed his brother incapable of making a good choice. This fault in Don—he finally saw—went much wider than Jamie. It was the shadow cast by his skill at helping people.”
Attempting to straddle the line between themes of family and addiction, the author misses both in the process.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-86207-549-2
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Granta
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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While a few weeks ago it seemed as if Praeger would have a two month lead over Dutton in their presentation of this Soviet best seller, both the "authorized" edition (Dutton's) and the "unauthorized" (Praeger's) will appear almost simultaneously. There has been considerable advance attention on what appears to be as much of a publishing cause celebre here as the original appearance of the book in Russia. Without entering into the scrimmage, or dismissing it as a plague on both your houses, we will limit ourselves to a few facts. Royalties from the "unauthorized" edition will go to the International Rescue Committee; Dutton with their contracted edition is adhering to copyright conventions. The Praeger edition has two translators and one of them is the translator of Doctor Zhivago Dutton's translator, Ralph Parker, has been stigmatized by Praeger as "an apologist for the Soviet regime". To the untutored eye, the Dutton translation seems a little more literary, the Praeger perhaps closer to the rather primitive style of the original. The book itself is an account of one day in the three thousand six hundred and fifty three days of the sentence to be served by a carpenter, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. (Solzhenitsyn was a political prisoner.) From the unrelenting cold without, to the conditions within, from the bathhouse to the latrine to the cells where survival for more than two weeks is impossible, this records the hopeless facts of existence as faced by thousands who went on "living like this, with your eyes on the ground". The Dutton edition has an excellent introduction providing an orientation on the political background to its appearance in Russia by Marvin Kalb. All involved in its publication (translators, introducers, etc.) claim for it great "artistic" values which we cannot share, although there is no question of its importance as a political and human document and as significant and tangible evidence of the de-Stalinization program.
Pub Date: June 15, 1963
ISBN: 0451228146
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Praeger
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1963
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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Hannah’s sequel to Firefly Lane (2008) demonstrates that those who ignore family history are often condemned to repeat it.
When we last left Kate and Tully, the best friends portrayed in Firefly Lane, the friendship was on rocky ground. Now Kate has died of cancer, and Tully, whose once-stellar TV talk show career is in free fall, is wracked with guilt over her failure to be there for Kate until her very last days. Kate’s death has cemented the distrust between her husband, Johnny, and daughter Marah, who expresses her grief by cutting herself and dropping out of college to hang out with goth poet Paxton. Told mostly in flashbacks by Tully, Johnny, Marah and Tully’s long-estranged mother, Dorothy, aka Cloud, the story piles up disasters like the derailment of a high-speed train. Increasingly addicted to prescription sedatives and alcohol, Tully crashes her car and now hovers near death, attended by Kate’s spirit, as the other characters gather to see what their shortsightedness has wrought. We learn that Tully had tried to parent Marah after her father no longer could. Her hard-drinking decline was triggered by Johnny’s anger at her for keeping Marah and Paxton’s liaison secret. Johnny realizes that he only exacerbated Marah’s depression by uprooting the family from their Seattle home. Unexpectedly, Cloud, who rebuffed Tully’s every attempt to reconcile, also appears at her daughter’s bedside. Sixty-nine years old and finally sober, Cloud details for the first time the abusive childhood, complete with commitments to mental hospitals and electroshock treatments, that led to her life as a junkie lowlife and punching bag for trailer-trash men. Although powerful, Cloud’s largely peripheral story deflects focus away from the main conflict, as if Hannah was loath to tackle the intractable thicket in which she mired her main characters.
Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the pages turning even as readers begin to resent being drawn into this masochistic morass.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-57721-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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