Fourteen stories, some of which were published in obscure literary mags, make up this grab-bag debut collection. Six pieces set in Chicago are told from a young girl's point of view, with a few of them re-creating her breathless syntax and loose sense of punctuation. Rachel and Miriam, Loeb's alternating fictional protagonists, indulge in much commonplace behavior. In the title story, Rachel joins her friends in their petty cruelty to an unusual girl who also happens to be the best jump-roper around. In ``Madame Alexander,'' Rachel's expensive doll collection drives a wedge between her parents and upsets her jealous best friend. ``Birthday Girl'' wanders over a history of youthful parties, and leads into her parents' divorce. At 15, in ``The Sadie Hawkins Day Dance,'' Rachel befriends an unpopular fat girl, who proves to be quite sexually active, much to Rachel's disgust. The joys and sorrows of a Jewish family gathering provide the texture of ``Family Meetings.'' And Miriam, in her 20s, relives her tortured teenage years through the troubled sister of her boyfriend (``The Koquettes''). As an adult, Rachel lives in Florida, where she and her husband entertain and console a group of local bachelors (``The Bachelors''); and, on two occasions (``The World Traveller'' and ``Safe Passage''), she endures the visits of her mother, whose physical decline results in much guilt. Rachel complains while sorting out her mother's things back in Chicago (``Uncertain Geographers''), while Miriam whines her way through a visit to New York City (``Going Under'') and a one-night stand in San Francisco (``Henry's Africa''). Two uncharacteristic stories are really the most interesting—a meditation on alligators (``Fauna in Florida''), and a tale of one man's obsession with Hawaiian shirts (``Hawaiian Dukes''). Familiar stuff about growing up: competently crafted, but very much a first book.
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-89823-145-0
Page Count: 139
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993
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
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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