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DINNER FOR TWO

Name: DINNER FOR TWO
Author: Mike Gayle
ISBN: 0-7434-7766-9

by Mike Gayle ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004

Slick and quick.

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Britisher Gayle (My Legendary Girlfriend, 2002) bowls another one down the lad-lit lane with this slight and lighthearted riff on fatherhood.

Dave, the Trinidadian music critic for Louder, “the magazine for people who live music,” and Izzy, his Anglo-Welsh-Polish wife, the deputy editor of the glossy women’s magazine Femme, are “poster children for the twin-income no-kids generation”—until the evening they set out to disprove an article Izzy has just edited on the decline in sexual activity among thirtysomething couples. Within weeks, the two are awaiting the results of a home pregnancy test. Dave finds himself more excited than Izzy about pending parenthood, and he writes a syrupy letter that begins, “Dear Foetus . . . .” When Izzy miscarries, Dave is eager to try again. Not she. Crisis Number One. Then Louder folds, and Dave slides into writing “sensitive male” articles for Femme and sitting in as an advice columnist at Teen Scene. He’s a surprise success at “Love Doctoring,” and his teenaged readers include one Nicola O’Connell, who writes him a letter identifying herself as Dave’s love-child, the result of a one-night stand with her mother in 1986 in Corfu. She’s recognized him from the photo on his column. Dave begins a clandestine parenting relationship with Nicola, meeting at a Burger King and beginning to feel like her father. But what to tell Izzy? All this is sappy at times, but Gayle is most nuanced in detailing Dave’s growing attachment to his daughter, and the complications her existence—and his secrecy—bring to his marriage. Along the way, the story’s enlivened by witty and knowing descriptions of the magazine world, including a sardonic pastiche of articles written from the sensitive guy’s point of view (“Women and the messages they leave on men’s answerphones”) and samples from Dave’s column (“Dear Love Doctor Dave, My dad caught me and my boyfriend lying on my bed kissing and he went ballistic. . . .”).

Slick and quick.

Pub Date: July 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-7434-7766-9

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Downtown Press/Pocket

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE MUSEUM OF ORDINARY PEOPLE
by Mike Gayle

- BOOK REVIEW
ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE
by Mike Gayle

- BOOK REVIEW
TURNING THIRTY
by Mike Gayle

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.