An earnest novel about one man’s personal transformation during a decade of political change.
A historical novel of race, love, and destiny set in a tumultuous 1960s America.
It’s the summer of 1960 and Royal Finley is a black graduate student at the University of Chicago. His friend and fellow student Rodney Johnson, who’s also black, is sympathetic to the Black Nationalist movement—Malcolm X makes a cameo in the opening pages, which leads to a conversation between him and Royal—while Royal adheres to a more individualistic conception of human freedom, telling his friend: “It’ll take more than laws to make us free.” Royal is also sexually impotent—in contrast to the philandering Rodney—and his anxieties about this undercut much of the novel. He develops a relationship with Nadine Miles, a white graduate student who studies African history. Their story is set against the backdrop of the civil rights struggles of the ’60s, encompassing African nationalism, miscegenation laws, and the Freedom Riders. In Indianapolis, Royal experiences a tense exchange with Nadine’s family over their relationship. Questions of race and desire—and how the two are intertwined—loom large for Royal, who, by the end of the book, ends up advising Lyndon Johnson on school integration. The book’s sense of history feels authentic—true to the “combination of fact and fiction” that Cheek references in the preface. Near the middle of the book, the author portrays Royal looking “intensely into his soul,” where he sees “confusing images of his obscure and vague sense of ethnicity.” This is the novel’s central theme, as Royal’s rise to the heights of the civil rights movement offers an effective portrait in miniature of the decade’s political transformation. Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of this book is how it interweaves the biographical and the historical as the protagonist searches for authenticity, finding himself repeatedly “returning to his ethnic roots to reexamine his life’s quilt.” The book’s spiritual tone and stilted prose may alienate some readers, though, as in lines such as “they embraced and shared the nectar of their individual souls.”
An earnest novel about one man’s personal transformation during a decade of political change.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9988635-0-4
Page Count: 558
Publisher: QuarticPress
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2019
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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