A crowded but very impressive debut, especially for readers who like their fiction strange.
This debut novel follows the multifarious adventures of a doctor as he searches for whatever succor a mysterious Lost House in the New England woods may offer.
First-person narrator Dr. Kit Zeno is a Wesford, Massachusetts, pediatrician trying to keep his career going and save his foundering marriage. On the first point, he’s semi-successful; on the second, he’s not, and he’s heartbroken when his wife, Beryl, walks out, leaving him with their two daughters, Cassie and Ruby Jo. From there on, the book becomes an episodic grab bag. Readers meet the good doctor’s patients (and their parents) early on, and they meet the children again later, after they’re grown. These kids—Andy Cosmo, Dewy Diels, Monica Herdman, and others—turn out to be both brilliant and twisted; Andy, for example, is a computer genius—and also possibly guilty of matricide. Zeno has shady dealings with people performing studies at the pharmaceutical startup Tecche, including its seriously weird leader, Bucky Magnifico. There’s also Stan Trupeano, a local “old crank” rumored to be a mad scientist. Midway through the book, Zeno discovers the Lost House in the woods—a magical refuge. But will the story end, for Zeno, with salvation or with paradise lost? The protagonist and author share a name and a profession, which may give readers a rather blurred feeling: has the real Zeno had these adventures? Almost certainly not, but the author may be implying that we should all let our alter egos run loose. The Lost House is the only genuine magic in the book, but almost all the characters are beyond strange—either over the edge, or close to it. Zeno, like any classic hero, is searching not just for this Lost House, but for his true self and for peace. Ambition, though, is almost the undoing of Zeno, the author, as he can’t resist adding yet another character, yet another subplot, yet another flight of fancy. As a result, readers will quite often feel swamped.
A crowded but very impressive debut, especially for readers who like their fiction strange.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4834-1743-1
Page Count: 438
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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