A bit familiar but exciting nonetheless.
In a future dictatorship, detective Victor Vale starts questioning authority when, to infiltrate a dissident cell, he goes undercover as a writer.
Readers may be strongly reminded of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451—not so much by any Bradbury-esque poetry of language, which author Kruvant refrains from imitating, but by the similar consumer-dictatorship milieu, a capitalist police state in which artistic/creative acts are potential threats. Welcome to the Nation, a harsh, isolationist future-USA after WWIII, purged of nonwhites and micromanaged under a stern, distant female president. There’s a yawning chasm between rich and poor: ubiquitous robotics have left the now-obsolete working poor as a mob of beggars and low-caste disenfranchised homeless; those lucky enough to be born into the “Upperclass” or the government or security forces now dwell and commute in high-rise splendor in the skies, their affluent lives benumbed by violent video games, celebrity gossip, nanotech-enhanced sex, kitschy movies, and, of course, personal virtual-reality Internet connectivity. Art and literature are fiercely discouraged because “Creators” tend to rebel against the system. Narrator Victor Vale, a rising police detective, is fortunate enough to be married to a beautiful lawyer, and he expects further salary bonuses with a major assignment: go undercover as a Creator to determine whether Sylvester Huppington—head of a rare surviving book publisher and widely perceived to be a government lackey—actually leads a clandestine cell of Creators. But Vale’s vulnerabilities, such as sympathy for the beggars and a growing fascination with the Creator world, jeopardize his mission and his family. A great deal of this material is by now Dystopia 101, and the language is often rudimentary—perhaps befitting the writer/protagonist’s deliberately dumbed-down culture and upbringing. (Amusingly, while Bradbury’s “firemen” burned books, here the Technological Police Force “liquidate” them with some kind of spray-solvent.) Yet the entertaining narrative minefield pops with surprises and grim echoes of our present, keeping the pages turning toward a downbeat conclusion. In this battle of anti-intellectualism vs. the humanities, guess who has the bigger guns.
A bit familiar but exciting nonetheless.Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1942693178
Page Count: 280
Publisher: PanAm Books
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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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