A body slam of a book that’s nowhere near as powerful and decisive as it means to be.
An engaging protagonist and a lively style aren’t enough to salvage this over-the-top first novel by the former champion pro wrestler (Foley Is Good, not reviewed; etc.).
Narrator Antietam (“Andy”) Brown V is a 17-year-old high-school freshman reconnecting with his absentee father and experiencing a delayed adolescence following “a lifetime of foster homes, orphanages, and juvenile detention centers.” Antietam IV isn’t your ordinary dad: he exercises naked, encourages Andy to follow in his Herculean sexual footsteps, and plots revenge on neighbors whose outdoor holiday decorations outshine his own. Andy has emulated his father’s ferocity, having killed two people before age 14 (as vivid flashbacks gradually reveal). And he has sexual designs on gorgeous born-again Christian cheerleader Terri, plans that are repeatedly foiled by abuse from jocklike fellow students and their foulmouthed idol (and, for reasons that aren’t exactly clear, Andy’s sworn enemy), history teacher-football coach Hanrahan. Foley gets good seriocomic mileage out of Andy’s addled relationship with his volatile, interfering father, who’s initially presented as a broadly comic character, then shown to be a psychotic train wreck of a man with a tangled history of loss, grief, and vengeful breakdowns. And one admires such charmingly weird images as that of “Terri’s bare breasts springing from her bra, like a wire snake from a salted peanut can.” But Foley doesn’t know when to tune it down. Tietam Brown continuously spasms into episodes of cartoonish, sickening violence: we understand that it’s a legacy Andy wants to disclaim, but the point is made repeatedly, and a fairly absurd climactic father-son confrontation imitates the patented method of John Irving, with virtually none of the latter’s narrative drive and sheer reader-friendliness.
A body slam of a book that’s nowhere near as powerful and decisive as it means to be.Pub Date: July 8, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41550-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
