A novel of great pain and loneliness, at times lyrical, at times turgid.
In deWitt’s debut novel, a Hollywood bartender reviews his life, both professional and romantic, and ultimately finds there’s no “there” there.
The subtitle, “Notes for a Novel,” suggests deWitt’s informality of approach. Many of the narrative fragments (the book is not technically written in chapters) begin “Discuss…”—and he fills in the blank with a name (“Discuss Sam, the bar’s principal cocaine dealer,” “Discuss the short, overweight Hispanic woman”). In this way we learn about the regulars in the bar as well as about those who work there, and unsurprisingly it turns out this Hollywood bar is not a hangout for the world’s most prepossessing subculture. Both customers and staff consume drinks lavishly, and cocaine, the drug of choice, is never far away. The “adventures,” such as they are, are invariably depressing: The bartender’s wife runs off with another man; customers share their wildest sexual fantasies (and sometimes try to realize them); Curtis, a “disconsolate black man and regular with a law enforcement fetish,” disappears from the bar for a while and then cloyingly reappears, one of life’s losers—“that is,” the bartender explains, “someone who has lost, and who is losing, and who will continue to lose for the rest of his life until he is dead and in the ground.” Eventually the bartender gets out of Dodge and goes on his own mini-odyssey, visiting bars (naturally) all over the Southwest and meeting fellow nonadaptive types. The culmination of the social function of the bar occurs when the owner dies and his wife decides to have a private wake at the bar, bringing together the regulars in an orgy of drunken revelry. True to the tone of the book, the story trails off open-endedly rather than resolves or concludes.
A novel of great pain and loneliness, at times lyrical, at times turgid.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-15-101498-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
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
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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