Overlong trek over familiar ground.
Five friends and three decades, as Landvik (Welcome to the Great Mysterious, 2000, etc.) returns to small-town Minnesota.
Little Women, anyone? Alcott’s females are an inspiration for the Freesia Court Book Club members, though there are two contenders for the role of rambunctious Jo and none for meek Beth. Gathering at the Minneapolis hospital where one of the five is undergoing treatment for cancer, they remember the dreary, endless winter they first got together, back when their kids were young and they all lived on the same tree-lined street. Mopping up baby food and stroking the egos of their self-involved husbands just didn’t seem all that fulfilling. Gee-whiz, what a surprise. But love and laughter—and friends and family—carried them through the chaotic years that changed a nation in so many ways . . . . Similar platitudes and preaching undermine the weak structure of this baggy tale and its multiple points of view, chapters linked by popular books of the time. The five friends, beginning in the late ’60s, are introduced one by one. Audrey Forrest is happy with her lush curves but her husband Paul thinks she’s fat. Angelically beautiful Merit Iverson smokes like a chimney, despite her doctor husband’s disapproval. Scrappy Faith Owens is sick and tired of husband Wade’s smugness, not to mention packing his suitcases (he’s an airline pilot). Kari Nelson, a gentle young widow, grieves over her husband Bjorn’s untimely death and their infertility. Slip McMahon is an ultrafit jockette, happily married to a research meteorologist, and just loves the freaky Minnesota weather. As time goes by, Audrey gets a divorce and finds new friends (two gay men); Merit ditches the abusive and dominating doctor; Faith comes to terms with her mixed feelings about her long-lost mother; Kari adopts a mixed-race child; Slip becomes a social worker. The world changes but all remain tight, all the way to menopause and telltale gray hairs.
Overlong trek over familiar ground.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-43882-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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