In Ifkovic’s latest fictionalization of the adventures of Edna Ferber (Downtown Strut, 2013, etc.), the clever plot and...
A fictional episode in the life of novelist/playwright Edna Ferber brings the writer, now a middle-aged spinster, to New Jersey to champion justice and young love.
Although Edna enjoyed acclaim as the co-author of The Royal Family, she’s always dreamed of acting in it. Now she has a chance to play the matriarch in a one-week production her co-author, George S. Kaufmann, is directing in a theater in suburban New Jersey. It’s 1940, and the rapidly changing events in Europe seem to have left peaceful Maplewood untouched. As Edna settles in and enjoys lemon phosphate and tuna casserole at the Full Moon Cafe, she meets some of the lesser members of the cast, including Evan Street, a dazzlingly handsome young man who’s understudying one of the leads at the request of his mother, a friend of the producer’s. But as rehearsals begin, Evan makes himself more and more unpopular, especially with stage manager Dakota, whose mother, Clorinda Roberts Tyler, is a successful evangelist in Maplewood. Dak, Clorinda’s designated heir, is engaged to one of his mother's disciples, although he seems more attached to his stage work and to Nadine Novack, a young actress who knew both him and Evan in Hollywood. The presence of a couple of Nazi sympathizers isn’t the first hint of trouble in Maplewood, but it’s certainly one of the more disturbing elements—especially when one of the cast members is found shot to death. Edna, increasingly convinced that the seeds of the murder were planted years ago in Hollywood, is determined to find the facts, whatever the risk.
In Ifkovic’s latest fictionalization of the adventures of Edna Ferber (Downtown Strut, 2013, etc.), the clever plot and colorful original characters are very welcome, though the leisurely pace and the attempts to emulate Kaufmann’s and Ferber’s wit fall flat.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0290-2
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Groovier than much of this erratic author’s fiction, but a bummer compared with his best.
For better and worse, this is the closest Pynchon is likely to come to a beach book.
A psychedelic beach book, of course: It’s hippie-era Los Angeles, and our hero smokes marijuana the way others smoke cigarettes, which is something of an occupational hazard in a profession that requires deductive abilities. About a third the length of its predecessor (Against the Day, 2006, etc.) and as breezy as a detective novel by Tom Robbins, the book begins with a beautiful woman walking into the office of private investigator Larry “Doc” Sportello to ask for help. Formerly Doc’s girlfriend, Shasta has been associating more recently with Mickey Wolfmann, a very rich and married developer whom Doc knows from the newspapers as “the real estate big shot.” Mickey’s wife and her lover apparently want him institutionalized, but as usual in a Pynchon novel, there are conspiracies atop conspiracies as Doc tries to get to the people who are running the people who seem to be running things. With Charlie Manson poisoning the free-love ethos and land-grab developers putting the soul of Southern California up for grabs, Doc finds himself enmeshed deeper in a plot that defies resolution. The mystery focuses on the Golden Fang, which may be a schooner, a heroin cartel, an enterprise of “vertical integration” or a vast international conspiracy. Maybe all of the above. The story will make the most sense to those as stoned as Doc, though it’s hard to resist questions like, “Anybody understand why they call it ‘real’ estate?” or a simile such as “the figure dropped like an acid tab into the mouth of Time”—highly appropriate for a protagonist who tends to divide the totality of experience into “groovy” and “bummer.” Or, once, for emphasis, “Bumm. Er.”
Groovier than much of this erratic author’s fiction, but a bummer compared with his best.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59420-224-7
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
Leisurely, conscientiously plotted, smoothly written, and more surprising in its details than its larger arc.
A fatal accident that tangles the fates of three ill-assorted people when two cars crash into each other outside a Gloucester village raises urgent questions about the living.
Hours after being ejected from the Lamb, Viv Holland’s pub in Lower Slaughter, her former boss Fergus O’Reilly, who’s turned up without warning and pressed her to take a new job 12 years after she quit his Michelin-rated Chelsea restaurant, is found dead after a collision outside the village. Nor is he the only victim: Nell Greene, the Lamb patron who’d picked up Fergus when she saw him walking uncertainly along the road to drive him to the hospital, has also died at the scene. And there’s evidence that Fergus was fatally poisoned even before the crash. The Met’s Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid and his wife, DI Gemma James, are on hand to investigate because they’ve accepted an invitation to stay at Beck House, the home of DS Melody Talbot’s wealthy parents, Sir Ivan and Lady Adelaide Talbot, for whom Viv has agreed to cater an elaborate charity luncheon. But Kincaid, who was driving the car Nell struck and survived the collision only to see Nell die as he looked on helplessly, isn’t himself either physically or mentally, and the solution seems a long way off. There’ll be another murder, a series of increasingly revealing flashbacks to Viv’s stint at O’Reilly’s 12 years ago, and endless updates on the sexual histories of the suspects with the victims, each other, and the police. Through it all, Kincaid and Gemma (Garden of Lamentations, 2017, etc.) keep stiff upper lips even when the dark revelations reach into Beck House.
Leisurely, conscientiously plotted, smoothly written, and more surprising in its details than its larger arc.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-227166-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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