A familiar story made new by the empathetic main character and an authentic rock ’n’ roll universe.
In Anderson’s novel, a musician rehabilitates himself and has one last go at success, culminating in an appearance at the Grammy Awards.
At the Grammy Awards in 1997, Zack Fluett, keyboardist with the band Cultural Wasteland, makes headlines when he punches his co-writer and lead singer, Lark Dray, in the nose, breaking his hand in the process. The novel toggles back and forth in time, cataloging the events leading up to the punch and Zack’s post-Grammy fall from grace and his eventual, song-by-song rise to a position of respectability in the music community once again. We see Zack at various key moments in his life: meeting Lark at a party in 1991 and forming the band that will eventually become Cultural Wasteland; his marriage to Claudia Rankin, a publicist whose Philadelphia high-society upbringing is at odds with Zack’s childhood, spent on a ranch in Billings, Mont.; his building a recording studio at his home outside Aspen as a way of getting reacquainted with his muse. The framing device for the story is the Grammy Awards broadcast in 2008, where, a decade after his last infamous appearance, Zack finds himself nominated for song of the year and reckoning with the demons from his past. An entertainment lawyer, rock musician and record label owner, the author writes knowingly about the music scene. His story is as old as rock ’n’ roll itself—a cautionary tale of how sex, drugs and rampant ego can torpedo a career. What redeems it is the wit and honesty with which Zack narrates his story and the author’s eye for detail, as manifested in his faux discographies, Billboard charts and newspaper articles that begin every chapter. Although the ending is pat, there are enough jagged edges for this rock novel to qualify as the real deal.
A familiar story made new by the empathetic main character and an authentic rock ’n’ roll universe.Pub Date: April 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0989025119
Page Count: 358
Publisher: West Butte Books
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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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