This novel isn’t for the squeamish, prudish, or faint of heart.
When Ronald Checker hops into the back of Terry “Juice” Lawson’s taxi late one night in Edinburgh, on the eve of Hurricane Bawbag, Terry finds himself entangled in various webs of love, lust, money, and violence.
Checker is an American "punk businessman" complete with reality TV stardom, Southern pedigree, and fanatical, self-serving religious faith. When he hops into the back of Terry’s cab and hires him for the remainder of his stay in the city, Terry’s life begins to stockpile not only criminal plots, but also an onslaught of undesirables one might hope to avoid: his flighty half brother, Jonty MacKay, who works under-the-table painting gigs; his various bastard children; several prostitutes; “The Poof,” a local gang ringleader, and his posse; a Dane with a competing offer on a rare bottle of Scotch; and too many women to count or catalog. Terry manages to deal drugs, placate the man-child millionaire, and shag his way across the entire Midlothian; he attempts to locate a missing call girl, nearly reconnects with his children, and discovers that his heart is no longer healthy enough for sex. His relationships are plenty, complicated, and nuanced. As always, Welsh (The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins, 2015, etc.) takes things from zero to 60 in his latest novel. Chapters alternate between the perspectives of various characters, and many are written entirely in broad Scots, one of Welsh’s trademark stylings. Also true to form are the characters, always gritty and with unrelenting personality. The baggage each character lugs around is heavy, often resulting in various shades of violence such as rape, murder, and arson. Masterfully, Terry develops and stays true to his almost fiendish appetites throughout the novel, all while exploring his complicated family history and romantic endeavors, and still manages to avoid incarceration.
This novel isn’t for the squeamish, prudish, or faint of heart.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-54089-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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