A worthy parable of small changes and large obstacles.
Set in the near future, DeSain’s first novel is a wide-ranging satire of the workings of the government and the people who comprise it.
Tammy Usher works in the Department of Transportation supervising the scheduling and maintenance of the light-rail system, which has overtaken the car as the primary American mode of transport, as oil prices have risen. She is content with her work, fraught with office politics and headaches as it is. Tammy meets Bob, an inventor, who has a comparatively small invention that’s grand in Tammy’s eyes: an improvement to the rail system that will yield a “point-five-to-two percent efficiency increase.” They begin to work together in an effort to convince Congress to fund Bob’s invention; neither knows exactly how much work it will take to do so. In the course of their quest, they encounter government officials, lobbyists and those who fund them, politicians both liberal and conservative, church organizations and venture capitalists. DeSain pokes fun at all of them with an equally heavy hand. His strength as a writer lies with ideas rather than prose, but those ideas are sharp enough to make the book work. Many of those he spends several pages picking apart are characters who have lost, if indeed they ever had, the courage of their convictions. Liberal politicians who disclaim their radical pasts, religious men who care more about profits than salvation and spineless heirs to familial wealth all stand out as targets of satire. The route Tammy and Bob finally take to adding their small but significant contribution to ease the lives of the masses indicates, however, that unbending adherence to a set of principles is equally laughable. DeSain, himself a scientist with government experience, writes almost lovingly of the infuriating amount of red tape that faces an inventor who wants federal support and with disdain for those who ignore facts in favor of playing politics. Though the imagined near future is bleak in ways, it allows for some victories.
A worthy parable of small changes and large obstacles.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615686080
Page Count: 246
Publisher: John D. DeSain
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 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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