Finding myself filled with an overmastering wish to find out what happened after Fanny married Edmund, and when Susan came to live at Mansfield," Aiken offers a smooth sequel to Jane Austen's 1814 Mansfield Park—with steady charm and humor, but with tidy sentimentality taking the place of Austen's more rigorous exploration of character. It's some five years after the wedding of Edmund to cousin Fanny; Edmund's father, Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park, has died while on business in the West Indies; so Fanny and Edmund, with a baby son, set off to settle family matters in Antigua—leaving indolent, self-involved Lady Bertram to be looked after by Edmund's hearty brother Tom (the new Sir Thomas) and by Fanny's 18-year-old sister Susan, who has been Lady B.'s live-in companion since coming to Mansfield Park at age 1.4. (Fanny and Susan are poor relations from a shabby naval household in Portsmouth.) From the start, then, it seems as if brusque Tom and saucy Susan are headed for another cousinly romance—especially since they're constantly bickering. Before the final confessions of devotion, however, there'll be an array of Austen-ish red herrings: Tom's insufferable sister Julia, a meddling snob living nearby, is intent on pairing Tom off with her equally snooty sister-in-law; Tom himself, a huntsman who's far from eager to marry at 30, plans eventually to ask for the hand of sweet, pretty Miss Harley (another neighbor); Susan finds a soulmate in a gentle visiting clergyman. Then, arriving suddenly from the pages of Mansfield Park, the notorious Crawfords reappear on the scene: vivacious Mary (once courted by Edmund) is now a frail, courageous refugee from a disastrous marriage, seriously ill; her brother Henry (once the dishonorable suitor of Fanny) now seems to be a changed man; they take up residence in the White House, a Mansfield Park cottage with happy memories for the dying Mary, who is soon being doted upon by fine Susan. But, though a series of events—a ruined picnic, Tom's fall from a horse, Miss Harley's engagement—brings both Tom and Susan close to the newly noble Crawfords, the cousins will end up blissfully together. . . after a teary deathbed scene (more Dickens than Austen) and the usual misunderstandings. Throughout, in fact, Aiken's sense and sensibility are more marshmallowy than Austen's—softening Lady B.'s selfishness, redeeming the Crawfords, transforming shallow Tom into a fit mate for Susan with implausible ease. But, while the more hard-headed Austen fans will probably prefer Jane Gillespie's 1983 Ladysmead (all about what happened to horrid Maria Bertram, an offstage player here), other Mansfield Parkers will find this an endearing, cozily amusing follow-up.
Pub Date: March 1, 1985
ISBN: 0575400242
Page Count: 193
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1985
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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