SaFranko (Lounge Lizard, 2007, etc.) has a talent for two-fisted, Bukowski-esque prose, but he needs a story more worthy of...
A couple’s torrid affair slowly hits the skids over money, sex and art.
The novel stars narrator Max Zajack, who’s struggling to balance go-nowhere jobs with an ambition to write great fiction in the lover-and-fighter mode of Norman Mailer and Henry Miller. (The book includes a praise-soaked introduction by Dan Fante, another member of that tribe.) Max is living in a decrepit New Jersey apartment and loading trucks for a living when, one night after playing guitar in a coffee shop, he meets Olivia, an attractive literature student. Their connection is almost immediate, though their relationship is more about sex than anything else—in the early pages SaFranko’s prose is enthusiastically profane, capturing the hunger the two have for each other’s bodies. Max moves into Olivia’s apartment not long after, but it’s soon clear that Olivia has bigger issues than he can handle: She quits her classes in a fit of pique, spends money she doesn’t have on expensive clothes and is prone to screaming fits and threats that she’ll do herself in. As Olivia’s erratic behavior endangers the couple, Max struggles to find work, and many of the most entertaining set pieces have more to do with his day-job frustrations than with the titular character. Max’s gigs involve doing practically nothing at AT&T and delivering newspapers to wealthy New Jersey suburbanites, jobs that heighten the novel’s man-versus-Middle-America theme. As a narrator Max is engaging, funny and full of straight-talk, and his novel-in-progress is meant to push back against the complacency he witnesses daily. But while Max feels full-blooded, Olivia is largely a bundle of ever-escalating rage. There’s little effort to identify the root causes of her actions (scenes describing her troubled relationship with her parents are thin), so the final chapters of the novel take on a repetitive feel: Olivia does something flighty, Max attempts to reason with her, Olivia explodes. Eventually the squabbles sap the novel’s power—it, like the relationship it describes, has gone on for too long.
SaFranko (Lounge Lizard, 2007, etc.) has a talent for two-fisted, Bukowski-esque prose, but he needs a story more worthy of it.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-197919-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
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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