In a second collection of blue-collar stories (The Rat Becomes Light, 1990), Secreast continues to impress with gritty, heartfelt fiction that chronicles life in a North Carolina factory town—this time by interconnecting 11 pieces that tell the moving saga of one family. Curtis and Adele Holsclaw, in the Appalachian foothills, have three children: wild Marleen, curious Phyllis, and bashful Dennis. The stories about the family move from their early life together to last things, mostly in chronological order. In ``Where the Modern World Begins,'' set in 1952, Curtis is a gambling man busy in his yard digging a septic tank. A rooster won by gambling attacks his son Dennis, and Curtis puts an end to the rooster—and, we suspect, to his gambling career—by impaling the bird. By ``Road Skills,'' set several years later, we're watching Marleen, already clever to the world, pretend to learn how to drive from her father (boyfriends have already taught her): ``Marleen knew which [gear] was which, but she waited until Curtis pointed before touching the pedal he indicated.'' ``If You See Me Coming'' is a dazzling coming-of-age story featuring Phyllis that climaxes with her climbing into an iron lung in order to understand the limitations of life. After the title piece—in which Gaither Drum, who ``on a busy day...could carry twelve tacks at a time in his mouth,'' saves Marleen from Junior McLaughlin (``shiftless enough and stubborn enough to be considered dangerous by the local law'') through an upholstering contest—things turn grim. Remaining stories chronicle the death of a grandparent, Marleen's divorces and slow death from cancer, and Curtis's and Adele's effort (in ``The Necessary Arrangements'' and ``For Sentimental Reasons'') to grieve without turning to stone. A bull's-eye—full of luminous detail and a wisdom grounded in seasonal, industrial and, most of all, familial cycles.
Pub Date: May 26, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-016441-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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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