Enough jabs at law and criminal justice to make a point, all packaged in a courtroom drama that’s pure entertainment.
Krakoff’s debut satire delivers the tale of modest kosher butcher Leopold Plotkin, whose simple act of smearing mud on his shop window leads to a grandiose trial.
Leopold’s been socially awkward since he was a little boy in Fettig, capital city of the Republic. Once his family bequeaths him the butcher shop, he’s uncomfortable displaying his snazzy meat-cutting skills to draw customers. So when that fails to boost sales, Leopold opts for covering the display window with mud. Fettigians, however, are upset, seeing the shrouding of a commercial window as an affront to capitalism. Ensuing protests and demonstrations ultimately become so rowdy that authorities arrest Leopold and throw him in the Purgatory House of Detention for instigating the Mud Crisis. And so begins this farcical take on the justice system, in which a criminal trial commences with a lawyer’s “Opening Rant,” and the prosecution must prove “beyond a Nagging Doubt” that the accused is guilty. Leopold faces seemingly impossible odds. Presiding Justice Stifel, for one, is so convinced of Leopold’s guilt that he overrules every objection from the defense—decreeing each one an interruption—and asks the jury for a verdict before a single witness has even testified. Fortunately, Leopold has employee, pal, and chicken plucker Primo Astigmatopolous and childhood friend Ana Bloom on his side, so there may be a slight chance of an acquittal. Krakoff’s satirical slant definitely has bite—Stifel accessing the courtroom via a dumbwaiter, for example, speaks volumes. But the uproarious novel is first and foremost a comedy, rife with absurdist humor. Some of it is even a comedy of errors: public defender Felix Bleifus, unaware that Leopold’s a butcher, is terrified when he spots blood on his potential client’s shirt. “Unlike most of my competitors,” Leopold says, “I do my own slaughtering.” Krakoff, though, still manages a coherent, engrossing plot. His good-natured protagonist is easy to like, and readers will surely be on edge during the trial, particularly because at least one juror, who admits to despising Leopold, has all but convicted him.
Enough jabs at law and criminal justice to make a point, all packaged in a courtroom drama that’s pure entertainment.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-68114-197-8
Page Count: 265
Publisher: Anaphora Literary Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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