Not dependent on the award-winning Chronicle (1958), this continues the picaresque experiences of the surviving members of the family, Miss Honora, Coverly and Moses; whose egregious eccentricity was a more prominent feature of the earlier took. While this approach also is a little off center, it is more awry than askew. Miss Honora, indomitable at 70, represents the "surprising abundance of life" but life itself is unaccountable, a "migration" full of random irrelevancies. But there's more to it than just a tilted perspective— Cheever seems to be haunted by what one critic called the "everpresent danger and the half-felt queerness of contemporary existence". Although there may be some escape through the hot certainties of the flesh, there are still the dusty answers— "no cure for autumn, no medicine for the north wind"; loneliness is a constant presence, death an occasional one, and above all there's a certain uneasiness with the world as it is. Less so for Honora whose ancien regime has had a fixed, autocratic authority. But Coverly has gone from the very old to the very new- a missile base with its "promethean powers" and menace. And he is saddened by his failure to bring happiness to Betsy. Moses is still more troubled; his Melissa runs off with a young boy, then to Italy, and leaves him with only the sodden solace of the ottle. The current chronology closes with a farewell to St. Botolph's and Honora.... heever, like Updike, is a loner in modern fiction; sui generis, he is also a special taste. But his admirers will again be fascinated by this new book, unstructured as it may be, with its passionate sense of life, its disconsolate awareness of loss, and its writing, much of which is remarkable, and, a word to be used charily, beautiful.
Pub Date: Jan. 3, 1963
ISBN: 0060528885
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1963
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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