Debut author Hoover’s intensely personal, wryly playful chronicle of his internal journey through the landscapes of his confused mind during an extended hospitalization for sepsis and toxic shock syndrome.
Hoover describes his experiences without the trappings of hallucination: no soft, fuzzy imagery or language evoking fugue states, but rather a knack for clever worldbuilding and the relentless coloring of dream logic. In this curious blend of medical memoir and magical realism, Hoover lays down a variety of memories and hallucinations. He imagines himself not in Charlotte, N.C. where he lives and is from, but in Manhattan, escaping there after being reconstructed with chicken legs and half a face at a rogue Confederate hospital full of body parts on conveyor belts. He abandons his wife on a South Dakota tarmac and greets the birth of a child who’s actually a tiny bean. Later, he sees his wife’s death written on the monitor at the foot of his bed and, in South Dakota, escapes attacks by Dog People and Native American boys with broken glass. As Hoover gradually becomes more lucid, his memories turn toward petty frustrations with hospital staff, medications and his body’s own limitations; although the same sense of humor runs through the writing, these passages feel more interested in amusing readers than the exuberantly creative earlier chapters. Chapter headers reference information about sepsis—“Supplemental oxygen should be supplied to all patients with sepsis and oxygenation should be monitored continuously with pulse oximetry”—and provide other keys to his personality through lyrics from U2, the Beatles and others. Aside from an assortment of crude black-and-white illustrations, Hoover offers refreshingly pure, imaginative storytelling, free of the musings on mortality, broader criticisms of the medical system or feel-good survivor’s advice often found in patient memoirs. Yet at more than 500 pages, the book is an exercise in completist documentation; a more tightly edited version could still offer readers a strong sense of his character as he traverses the minefields of his internal universe.
A fascinating tour through the escapist fantasies of an everyday brain in an exceptional crisis.
Pub Date: March 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1492966944
Page Count: 590
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2014
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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