This first collection by the author of Edisto and A Woman Named Drown is an odd and arresting mix of full-length stories and lots of little pieces—none of them conventional by any means, and all of them typical of Powell's goofy, southern-inflected lust for language. Powell's snippets include a number of fractured profiles of strange people and places gone weird. There are: ``Dr. Ordinary'' and his litany of the things he finds odious; ``General Rancidity,'' hated all over his military base because ``only the truly rancid themselves could run with him''; ``Mr. Nefarious,'' who smiles about his girlfriend and a fancy outdoor bench; ``Mr. Desultory,'' who gives in to regression because he cannot do things in succession; and ``Miss Resignation,'' who loses at Bingo so much she decides to smoke the cards. Powell clearly agrees with the notion voiced here that ``character is nothing but warts.'' Place fares poorly too: ``Kansas'' is defined by the absence of farming; ``Texas'' is a list of things done and some know-nothing aphorisms; ``South Carolina'' finds the pickup-driving narrator molesting a belle at a fancy cotillion; and ``Florida'' is a drunk lament about what used to be. In Powell's mordant and absurd world, you watch a flood (``Flood'') and a body floats into your arms; you work as a roofer and your buddy decapitates himself in a fall on the job (``Wayne's Fate''); you ramble and drink in the woods, and someone offers perversion (``Proposition''). Faulknerian style and subject come in for some direct ribbing. ``Wait'' sidetracks a rococo turn about a bulldog and a corncob with some plain talk; and ``Lebove and Son,'' a postscript to The Hamlet, considers the consequences of literary revelation. Not quite so academic, but metafictional in their own bizarre way, are ``Mr. Irony,'' a tale of ``low-affect living edged with self-deprecating irony''; and ``Mr. Irony Renounces Irony,'' the confessions of a style abuser. The much- reprinted title story is the narrative of a true underground man, an admitted ``piece of crud'' and unemployed steelworker who thinks he's just ``Typical.'' Lyrically intense and full of the surreal juxtapositions you find in the flotsam of floodwaters: stories at once edgy and exuberant.
Pub Date: July 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-374-28022-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1991
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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