An unsettling and uneven blend of fact and fiction in a first novel about one family's involvement with John Wayne. Barden, a freelance writer, did in fact know Wayne: His father, a contractor, had done work on the actor's home. Barden weaves together a series of incidents in his fictionalized family life (including Wayne's attempts to help the family negotiate their misfortunes) with recollections of Wayne's private life. Among the confessional matters covered are Wayne's exuberant sexual appetite, his knowledge of his limitations as an actor, his dreadful insecurity in his decades-long relationship with director John Ford, and his increasing frustration with his (often suffocating) public persona. Apart from a pair of early scenes, one with his first girl, the other detailing an affair with Marlene Dietrich, the story focuses on the last decade in Wayne's life, when the fictionalized Frank Barden worked for him. Invited to Duke's Christmas party in 1971 after having renovated the actor's house, Frank gets drunk and verbally abuses his own wife, Lillian, who had been dancing with an old acquaintance while Frank himself watched Duke and his cronies play poker. The next morning, Duke, arriving to get the car he loaned to Frank the night before, presides over an effort at reconciliation, but Frank, still drunk and surly, refuses his help. Years later, Lillian visits son Danny in the hospital, where he's recovering from a painful operation; the two trade stories about Duke, who is, at that moment, lying in another hospital, close to death. It becomes clear that both the public image and the private man have had a complex influence on the lives and expectations of the Bardens. There are sharp, persuasive glimpses here of the reality of celebrity life and the agony of a family coming apart at the seams, but the novel remains an odd pastiche in which fiction and fact commingle without generating clarity or significant insights.
Pub Date: July 9, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-48709-6
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
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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