A thoughtful delineation of characters and a sensitive study of a culture and an era.
Gabin’s (American Women in Gilded Age London, 2006, etc.) character-driven novel is set in Paris in the 1940s and present day.
Ben Gordon is pushing 30 and itching for real life to begin. He enlists in the good fight against Hitler, gets engaged to Sylvia Stern, a nice girl from the neighborhood, and is off to France, assigned to a military postal unit. He was asked to look up a family in Paris, which is how he meets Simone Daval; her mother, Mira; and her young son, Guy. Simone’s husband and her father, we eventually learn, were lured away and killed in the camps. The Germans are now on the run, but trauma remains. With their shared Jewish heritage—they get by in Yiddish—a strong bond develops between Ben and the Davals. Ben, a real mensch, tries to fill the void as a father figure for Guy and, inevitably, becomes something more than a friend to Simone. But he can’t bring himself to confess that he’s engaged. He is transferred to Frankfurt, and that is the last that the Davals hear from him. In Part 2, Judith Gordon and her brother, Michael, are going through their father’s effects after his funeral when Judith finds Ben’s photographs taken in Paris. Ben married Sylvia and had a good life, but like many veterans, he never talked about his Army days, and Judith is intrigued. She eventually tracks Guy down. He is thrilled to make contact but is adamant about not living in the too-painful past. However, the book explores their atypical connection. Gabin’s is a quietly powerful book, and Part 2 is especially engaging—a study in long-lasting hurt. She is not a flashy writer—no rococo flights to exploit and cheapen the pain. When Guy writes, “Your letter…brought back so many memories. It was a sorrowful and also a joyful time,” this is closer to Hemingway than to Faulkner—as it should be. Guy is a gracious host but gets angry when Judith presses him too much about the past. He can’t forget the pain of his stunted childhood, the Holocaust, the French collaborators, and his mixed feelings now for Ben, the “father” who abandoned him. But he refuses to wallow in it. Judith captures him perfectly as “this witty, sardonic, damaged man who drinks too much.” The mystery of Ben’s behavior remains. Did he realize that he wasn’t the adventurer he’d hoped to be? Did he use his promise to Sylvia as a cop-out? We only know that he made a comfortable living for the family as an accountant and that he and Sylvia retired to Florida—almost a parody of the dutiful burgher’s life. This, Gabin seems to be saying, is how culture and experience shape a life. Ben perhaps was, in the final analysis, the typical well-meaning but naïve Yank.
A thoughtful delineation of characters and a sensitive study of a culture and an era.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-09751-9
Page Count: 506
Publisher: Wisdom House Books
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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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