A stirring, well-constructed story that follows a tortured man’s moral journey.
In Zimmerman’s debut novel, an attorney takes a road trip as he grapples with guilt and seeks meaning in his life.
Gideon Roth is a lawyer in California’s Silicon Valley whose life is falling to pieces. First, he loses his last appeal for his client, Kareem Jackson, who’s put to death in the gas chamber after a 14-year legal battle. After the execution, he gets into a scuffle with a young punk. Gideon returns to his day job, but his current cases, involving intellectual property law, don’t stimulate him. His partners use his recent altercation as an excuse to fire him; then, his wife, Helen, tired of being neglected, leaves him. The changes make him contemplate what he’s accomplished in life. In his attempt to spare Kareem, who committed a heinous crime, Gideon discovered that his client’s grandfather was lynched and burned by the Ku Klux Klan. Kareem’s father, Jason, witnessed it; Jason was subsequently abused by his great-uncle and, in turn, abused Kareem. The resulting brain damage contributed to Kareem becoming a murderer. This starts Gideon thinking about 1964, when he spent a summer in Mississippi trying to register African-Americans to vote, and Klan members killed three civil rights workers. Gideon resolves to drive to Mississippi and kill the remaining men who escaped justice. The bulk of the novel proceeds at a leisurely pace as Gideon rides from his cabin in Washington state to Mississippi. Zimmerman uses this road trip as an effective framing device, allowing Gideon to reminisce about the recent and distant past in a continuing series of flashbacks. This clarifies why the protagonist sees only the failures in his life, and he hopes to balance karmic scales with violence. The author also makes clear that Gideon is grieving, and he affectingly shows how it takes other people to help him see the good that he’s done in his life. This sets up a race to stop a good man from doing a bad thing that readers will find riveting. In the end, the story reveals that even small improvements by individuals can result in lasting societal change.
A stirring, well-constructed story that follows a tortured man’s moral journey.Pub Date: March 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9600107-0-7
Page Count: 393
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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