Just the right mix of psychological incisiveness and historical drama: a bold story of displaced people and misdirected...
After a bizarre murder, the powder keg that is 1920s Palestine threatens to explode.
Writing a thriller masquerading as a literary novel, Wilson (The Hiding Room, 1995, etc.) hurls us right into the thick of a Palestine still healing from the wounds of WWI, chafing under British rule, and fast swelling with Zionist activists. All starts off on a beautiful summer night that’s shattered by the murder of an Orthodox Jewish man inexplicably dressed in Arab garb. Witness to the killing are Mark and Joyce Bloomberg—Mark a Jewish painter who’s been drummed out of the London scene by scathing reviews, and Joyce an American gentile dilettante with a strangely fixated devotion to the Zionist cause. The third side of this triangle is Robert Kirsch, a British policeman who is just as blase about his Jewish heritage as Mark is, and also just as attracted to the nervy, live-wire Joyce. Kirsch’s superior, an old-school, stiff-upper-lip type of the most enjoyable sort, proclaims himself a fan of Mark’s work and hires him to head off into the Transjordan to paint, conveniently leaving the door open for Kirsch and Joyce’s doomed affair. As often happens in books where writers have a larger agenda than simply puzzling out a crime, the murder investigation quickly becomes a quite desultory affair, with the primary suspect—a young Arab boy who may have been having an affair with the victim—being hidden from the cops by those who would prefer Jerusalem not explode in riots upon his arrest. What really interests Wilson, and reasonably so, is the ambivalent nature of the newly arrived Jews in Palestine, the barely concealed disdain they’re held in by the stretched-thin British authorities and the razor’s edge all of them walk.
Just the right mix of psychological incisiveness and historical drama: a bold story of displaced people and misdirected passions.Pub Date: June 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-42209-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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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