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GETTING IN

Name: GETTING IN
Author: James Finney Boylan
ISBN: 0-446-67417-6

by James Finney Boylan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998

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In a novel so light it threatens to drift free of the reader’s imagination with the first decent rerun of The Paper Chase, Boylan (The Planets, 1991; The Constellation, 1994) has contrived a fiction lacking in the richness of plot that made his earlier work such a hoot yet neglects to supply the compensations of well-developed characters, whose maturation is the theme here. Boylan makes admirable efforts to broaden the inert genre of Ivy League-style, white, proto-materialist teenhood by incorporating the parents of the hopeful youth here—who are trying to gain admission to at least one of nine New England colleges—into the cathartic tale. Ostensibly, the mission that sets the story in motion begins as Juddy (surfer dude), Polo (yuppie), Dylan (sensitive and shy), and Allison (sensitive and not shy) join adults Lefty, Ben, and Chloâ—who, in varying degrees, are parents to the three—in a Winnebago to travel the Ivy League circuit, with the teens interviewing at each stop. Ben and Lefty are brothers, whose latent rivalry is spiked with hidden secrets, while Chloâ, Lefty’s wife, is torn in her emerging affection for Ben. Mismatched lovers Allison and Polo are brought to their better senses somewhere around Connecticut, and Dylan comes to terms with his grief-tarnished past, ultimately getting the girl in a Wesleyan graveyard. While Boylan’s premise—that this stressful ordeal forces on everyone life-changing examinations of past and present—is exhausted fairly early; the sustaining. ambition of each member of the group seems to be: How to get sex with (select member of party) in good conscience? (Answer: Place friends in stressbox and shake.) Thus, the tiresome sexual irony of the title. Despite some genuine humor—particularly during the interviews themselves—Boylan’s uninspired creation suffers from another symptom of creative fatigue: improbably tidy resolutions of the half-dozen, imprecisely explored anxieties that salt the proceeding.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-446-67417-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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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.