It’s dismaying to see a great sportswriter reduced to feeble self-parody, becoming a potty-mouthed adolescent whose chief...
The pride of Goat Hills, Jenkins, perhaps our best living golf writer, returns to his thinly fictionalized version of the PGA Tour for the first time in a quarter-century.
When his novel Dead Solid Perfect was published in 1974, Jenkins (Rude Behavior, 1998, etc.) became one of the only writers to offer a fictional look at life on the pro-golf circuit. Few have taken up the challenge since (other than some mystery authors), and now Jenkins returns to this still relatively virgin territory for a second golf outing. The protagonist-narrator this time is Bobby Joe Grooves, a middle-of-the-pack pro with two ex-wives, a passion for golf history, and a taste for J&B and the good life. Although the setting is the golf tour and the story is larded with tour lore and history—the best parts of it, really—this effort isn’t much different from Jenkins’s previous novels about pro football or journalism: a stand-up comedy routine that goes on for nearly 300 pages, offering a bawdy, cynical, and outrageous picture of Good Ol’ Boy America as seen from the inside. There are lots of funny one-liners (“Nobody in pro golf reads the money list closer than ex-wives”) sprinkled in among the tales of horny men and willing women. But this is an aimless and meandering tale whose big plot development—that Bobby Joe wants desperately to make the Ryder Cup team and represent the USA—isn’t unveiled until Chapter 17 and whose denouement is both telegraphed and underplayed, with the result that the payoff to all the wandering is minimal at best. Jenkins, too, seems to have lost interest long before the final page.
It’s dismaying to see a great sportswriter reduced to feeble self-parody, becoming a potty-mouthed adolescent whose chief delight seems to be thinking up new ethnic and gender epithets. Pathetic.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-49723-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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