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THE MUSIC OF YOUR LIFE

Name: THE MUSIC OF YOUR LIFE
Author: John Rowell
ISBN: 0-7432-3695-5

STORIES

by John Rowell ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 7, 2003

Accomplished and promising.

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Seven longish tales explore newcomer Rowell’s North Carolina roots—and a world increasingly indistinguishable from the entertainment industry.

The title story is a second-person account of a life so influenced by Lawrence Welk, Batman, and Underdog that the difference between reality and television begins to blur: “And you stand there in the spotlight, holding your props, staring out the window at the streetlamp, not moving, as if waiting for your cue to begin the scene.” The film theme continues in “Spectators in Love,” a story that describes a boy’s fascination with a Mary Poppins LP—a replacement for family—then follows his interest in drama to his career as a film critic, an ultimately hollow life. A New York lesbian takes her new big-city values back home for her brother’s wedding in North Carolina (“The Mother-of-the-Groom and I”), where she’s sure to learn something about competing morals: “But maybe it’s just the way different people have of seeing the same exact thing; one person’s mile is wide, another person’s river is long.” The wildlife of “Wildlife of Coastal Carolina” consists of the crazy cast of characters a man encounters when he wakes up from a self-imposed depression-inspired sleeping binge after a youngster takes his advice to blow the beach community of Duck Island; and, in “Saviors,” a gay conductor is set up on a blind date in what may amount to the best possible example of humanity’s inability to engineer genuine feeling between people. Rowell’s pieces are all probably longer than they need to be, but you sense the author trying out his wings and combining themes for the longer effort sure to come. And even here the sensibility always finds a sweet, poignant note: “He could stand here forever, he thinks . . . And that’s good enough . . . ; the city needs people who are merely content to just look at it, to watch it, to regard it from a distance . . . .”

Accomplished and promising.

Pub Date: May 7, 2003

ISBN: 0-7432-3695-5

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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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.