Did we need transgressive fiction offered as arch comedy? It’s a bit like Irvine Welsh writing a sitcom.
A secondary-unit camera operator is recruited by a production company to help film a reality TV show on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean. Guess what? He’s not a very nice person.
It’s just possible that Coupland (Player One, 2010, etc.) might be angry with us. The wunderkind of the 1990s was dazzling in his early works, with provocative think pieces like Girlfriend in a Coma (1998), but the last decade has been hit or miss. For his latest, Coupland has apparently decided to go full-on gonzo, throwing every stylistic technique he’s ever employed into the mix and centering it all on a profane, drug-addled bastard repellent enough to piss off a congregation of saints. Raymond Gunt is our titular antihero, hired by his ghastly ex-wife, Fiona, to help film Survival, an elimination show being shot on the tiny island of Kiribati. Since the foul-tempered Gunt has no friends, he literally picks a homeless guy named Neal off the street and hires him to be his assistant. If you’re expecting a raunchy but good-natured comedy, you’d be wrong. Chapter by chapter, Coupland ratchets up the insanity. Neal chats up Cameron Diaz in first class while Gunt fumes in coach. Drugs are ingested regularly, and blackouts are frequent. Gunt puts himself into an allergy-induced coma. Twice. Later, he’s held hostage by a spiteful Army officer and made to dance “The Angry Dance” from the musical Billy Elliot. And then there’s that small matter of triggering a nuclear war. “Well then. We’ve all been in a pickle at least once in our lives, haven’t we?” Gunt asks. “One is born, one grows up. One gets in a pickle. The pickle is resolved, and then one dies. Snap!” It’s this kind of smarmy voice that makes the novel hard to take in large doses, but readers with strong stomachs may find some caustic humor here.
Did we need transgressive fiction offered as arch comedy? It’s a bit like Irvine Welsh writing a sitcom.Pub Date: April 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-16843-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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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