Goodman's third novel (The First I Saw Jenny Hall, High on the Energy Bridge)—a tale more programmatic than lively—concerns a baseball player, banned from the bigs for gambling, who gives up womanizing, makes peace with his father, and eventually gets his life together. ``Jewish Joe Singer'' is down on his luck: he's lost his wife and two kids, fans hate him, and he spends most of his time bikini- hunting on southern California beaches. The source of his troubles, it turns out, is his father, Jack, a transplanted Russian whose wife goes batty and who leads Joe astray. As for Joe's ex-wife, ``Joe was the first Jew she'd ever met, and she married him.'' Mainly, though, Joe is between the sheets with a string of beauties—until Emile, a psychopathic husband, blows his wife away on Joe's doorstep (``You think you can ball my wife, then slip back into your Gucci suits, your after-the-game interviews?''). Meanwhile, Joe ``progressed from making love to other men's wives to making love to one man's wife while falling in love with another man's girlfriend.'' Fannie, his true love and the current lover of Reverend Des, gets him involved in gun-control. And the baseball commissioner tells Joe that he'll be reinstated if he gives up politics and if he turns over the man who led him astray, so Joe visits his father. By book's end, the psychopath has killed Des and shot Joe, but Joe recovers in time for his father's wedding (after learning a few things about trust and honor and all that). As for Fannie, well, she and Joe might or might not make it—but the chances are good as Joe goes to the ballpark to ask his teammates to forgive him. A too-contrived comeback story, despite a few moving father- son confrontations.
Pub Date: May 15, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-58912-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
The Stand did less well than The Shining, and The Dead Zone will do less well than either—as the King of high horror (Carrie) continues to move away from the grand-gothic strain that once distinguished him from the other purveyors of psychic melodrama. Here he's taken on a political-suspense plot formula that others have done far better, giving it just the merest trappings of deviltry. Johnnie Smith of Cleaves Mills, Maine, is a super-psychic; after a four-year coma, he has woken up to find that he can see the future—all of it except for certain areas he calls the "dead zone." So Johnnie can do great things, like saving a friend from death-by-lightning or reuniting his doctor with long-lost relatives. But Johnnie also can see a horrible presidential candidate on the horizon. He's Mayor Gregory Aromas Stillson of Ridgeway, N.H., and only Johnnie knows that this apparently klutzy candidate is really the devil incarnate—that if Stillson is elected he'll become the new Hitler and plunge the world into atomic horror! What can Johnnie do? All he can do is try to assassinate this Satanic candidate—in a climactic shootout that is recycled and lackluster and not helped by King's clumsy social commentary (". . . it was as American as The Wonderful Worm of Disney"). Johnnie is a faceless hero, and never has King's banal, pulpy writing been so noticeable in its once-through-the-typewriter blather and carelessness. Yes, the King byline will ensure a sizeable turnout, but the word will soon get around that the author of Carrie has this time churned out a ho-hum dud.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1979
ISBN: 0451155750
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1979
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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