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DREAMS OF LONG LASTING

Name: DREAMS OF LONG LASTING
Author: Mark Medoff
ISBN: 0-446-51597-3

by Mark Medoff ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 11, 1992

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A promising if taxing debut by playwright Medoff (Children of a Lesser God, etc.) about a young Jewish playwright who does his best to make a mess of his life and then hangs in there long enough to sort it out. Jake Landau is an English grad student at Stanford when things start going wrong—or right (it's sometimes hard to tell which is which here)—and Leslie Ann Masterson, an aspiring actress, walks into his life. They glom onto each other as if Crazy Glued, but Jake notices some strange things: she wants him to sleep with her disabled friend, conceals her real name, and secretly meets with a car salesman who turns out to be her stepfather. Gradually the ugly truths dribble out—i.e., that Leslie Ann's mother committed suicide and that she was sexually abused by both her father and her stepfather. So, because Jake's too immature and Leslie Ann's simply too weird to handle a relationship, they split, with Jake going home to Miami Beach, where he gets engaged to an old girlfriend named Sandra while fending off a passel of crazy (and very funny) relatives. For a while Jake and Sandra try to make a life in the Southwest, where he's got a teaching job and his first play is produced. But both of them have affairs, and only the play prevails. It's moved to New York, where Medoff pulls off his hyperventilating climax—which includes the reappearance of Leslie Ann (about to deliver Jake's baby), good reviews for the show, and a revelation from Jake's dad about just how he spent the Holocaust. There's enough here for five years of a TV series, and a slight but insistent scent of therapy pervades. But Medoff's characters do have flesh on their bones, and his comic gift is undeniable. So if he gets a pair of shears and simplifies, his next book could be a joy.

Pub Date: June 11, 1992

ISBN: 0-446-51597-3

Page Count: 480

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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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.