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SEVEN WIVES

Name: SEVEN WIVES
Author: Jonathan Baumbach
ISBN: 0-932511-86-4

by Jonathan Baumbach ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1994

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Baumbach (Separate Hours, 1990; The Life and Times of Major Fiction, 1987) at his most amusing in a satire on the battle of the sexes that focuses largely on the male mind not quite up to the task of grasping the female mind. Jack, who was also the narrator of Reruns (1974), is deeply suspicious, and possibly paranoid, as he describes his seven wives and his search for the perfect mate. His most passionately loved wife, Regina (his first), is perfectly clear in her own ambiguous way when stating that she can't live with or without Jack. ``I love you, Jack, but the truth is I don't like you.'' Regina, he finds, is ``incapable of doing anything she had not already promised herself not to do.'' One morning he wakes up in bed with a second wife, Lulu, who bonds to him with alcohol for a year—he can barely remember ``her mean purple eyes and slightly lopsided Kewpie-doll face.'' Then, accidentally but quite believably, Jack marries his mother, a tie that lasts two utterly sunny years. His French- speaking fourth wife is a nail-raking, bruising ear-biter; their passion is all claws and caresses, but, under encroaching respectability, their love, too, fades. Jack achieves divorce quite often simply by leaving one profession for another and flying off alone to a new city. His next wife arrives by way of a personal ad in the New York Review of Books and is a wealthy 300-pound six- footer with whom lovemaking becomes an engineering feat. His sixth marriage is to a woman seemingly secure in her excessive beauty, his seventh a reprise of first wife Regina's extremes of ebullience and despair. Funny indeed, though a bizarre ending leaves a sour taste.

Pub Date: May 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-932511-86-4

Page Count: 184

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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ON THE WAY TO MY FATHER’S FUNERAL
by Jonathan Baumbach

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by Jonathan Baumbach

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

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DISTANT SHORES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...

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Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.

After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).