An absorbing, if uneven, mix of beguiling magical realism and bombastic social commentary.
A spirit—too scabrous to be completely holy—walks the earth weighing human souls in this florid fantasia.
Maffei’s nameless protagonist is a disembodied being who slips in and out of minds unnoticed, savoring or recoiling at whatever he finds. In letters to a book publisher named Ms. Sylvestri, he reports his impressions of the consciousnesses he samples—from a teenager whose ear-splitting music is “a screamworld of life’s-end chaos” to a man whose nose-picking is “as sensual, almost, as man’s penetrating taking of a woman”—and offers broader observations on human nature. He is particularly taken with sexuality, and pens odes to it that are sometimes romantic (“Oh, the sudden and alive spark of one man, one woman, joined at last, the joyous clasping together, two gods embodied in one bright flame”) and sometimes earthy (“You’ve got something I want! says man to woman, his eyes on her breasts, his hands on her sweet little ass as he sinks down on his knees.”) But he is also concerned with racism and sexism, particularly the persecution he feels whites and men suffer at the hands of blacks and women. The spirit’s soliloquies intertwine with captivating short stories about people he encounters, including a homeless alcoholic redeemed by a stray dog, a Hollywood producer and his resentful boy-toy, and an affectionate but troubled older couple at an amusement park. These strands unite when the spirit borrows a comatose man’s body and lures the other characters to an uncanny seminar at which he strips bare their souls in harrowing revelations. Maffei tells this tale in several hit-and-miss registers. His well-crafted narrative vignettes are written in a subtle, fluent prose that’s full of acute observations of character and emotion. The passages in the spirit’s voice are less convincing—declamatory or mystical, straining for big ideas—“Why do your laws so very much favor black racism over white racism?”—that are rather callow. Maffei’s ghost can be tiresome, but his living characters are well worth the read.
An absorbing, if uneven, mix of beguiling magical realism and bombastic social commentary.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450504874
Page Count: 190
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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