A promising but belabored start. The three story lines mesh only when forced.
The stories of a diva-in-training, a corporate lawyer and a mid-19th-century tenor are connected by Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, in Gallaway’s ambitious debut.
On his 41st birthday, Martin, prominent attorney and music lover, watches the 9/11 catastrophe from his office in a nearby Manhattan skyscraper, walks home seven miles to Washington Heights and resolves to alter his life. In the 1860s, Lucien, son of scientist Guillaume (who’s working on an anti-aging vaccine), is taken under the wing of his Parisian neighbor, a Romanian princess. Under her patronage, Lucien develops his natural gifts as a tenor, studying with the finest teachers. Maria, born in Pittsburgh in 1960, displays remarkable talent as a soprano and is noticed by Anna, a retired diva who helps secure her admission to Juilliard on scholarship. Martin, also of Pittsburgh, and Maria are the same age, and their paths have crossed before—Maria’s parents were both employed by Martin’s father. Both children were adopted and, on the verge of adulthood, lost their parents in fluky, fiery accidents. The three protagonists' lives are all touched, integrally and/or peripherally, by Wagner’s Tristan. Lucien debuts as Tristan when mad King Ludwig of Bavaria bankrolls a production of the dissonant opera that Paris considered too outrageous. Martin purchases the house of a reclusive tenor, Leo Metropolis, whom he had seen perform as Tristan. Metropolis crops up to give Maria career-transforming advice. After Eduard, Lucien’s lover, kills himself because the Hapsburg emperor condemns his architectural masterpiece, Lucien returns to Paris, only to suffer at the caprice of another emperor, Louis-Napoléon, who orders a human trial of Guillaume’s vaccine. Lucien joins his father as a guinea pig to test the highly toxic potion. Only one will survive—for a long, long time. Easily overlooked details present, upon review, a pleasingly intricate puzzle, but the novel’s cerebral tone, didactic digressions and rote characterizations often make for arduous reading.
A promising but belabored start. The three story lines mesh only when forced.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-46342-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
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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