Full of dazzling set pieces and flights of urban fancy, Wideman's first novel since his award-winning Sent For You Yesterday never quite coheres—it's a sprawling meditation on "the evil men do to their fellow men," and what holds it (tenuously) together is the "tired old Uncle Remus man" celebrated in the title. A hunchbacked homunculus, Reuben serves the Homewood section of Pittsburgh as a one-man legal-aid society. Decorous and eloquent, this tiny black man works from an old trailer, not much concerned with his clients' ability to pay. With his prodigious memory and mastery of government bureaucracy, Reuben delivers, even though, as we find out much later, his legal education—tricked from the frat boys he once served—doesn't make him a proper lawyer. He's a dreamer who dreams of ancient Egypt, African journeys, and conversations with the dead; he's a man "compulsively rehearsing his own life." Clients' stories break through his reveries: of Kwansa Parker, a whore of sorts, who's accused of being an unfit mother to her boy, Cudjoe; of Wally, a travelling college basketball recruiter, who confesses to killing white men in strange cities (or is it a fantasy of "abstract hate"?), and who tells the story of his friend, Bimbo, a popular soul crooner, crippled from the waist down in a car wreck (shades of Teddy Pendergrass). For every story listened to, Reuben has his own, including a breathtaking tale of sorrow and beauty from his tortured past. Different styles of rage and revenge animate these ghetto-based lives, each of which finds an apposite narrative voice. The elaborate dream-play and interiorized speechifying make for occasional confusion and excess. Otherwise, a truly luminous creation.
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1987
ISBN: 2070732347
Page Count: 253
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1987
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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