by Patrick McCabe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 2003
By turns fascinating, repulsive, heartbreaking, and unreadable: probably the greatest mess McCabe has published to date.
McCabe (Emerald Germs of Ireland, 2001, etc.) slips a bit deeper into the Slough of Despond with his latest account of madness, squalor, violence, perversity, and hope in the north of Ireland.
A tale by the celebrated Irish author is a harrowing experience usually redeemed by the brilliance of the story, but it will generally leave you feeling pretty drained. Here, again, we are introduced to a collection of Faulknerian monsters trapped within the borderland that separates Ireland from Northern Ireland during the troubled days of the 1970s and ’80s. The narrator is Joey Tallon, a kind of Celtic hippie who works in a pub, reads Herman Hesse and St. John of the Cross, smokes copious amounts of marijuana, and tries to keep out of mischief. The latter is easier said than done when half of your neighbors belong to the IRA and the other half pretend to, but Joey is a genial and unambitious lad without strong political views. Secretly in love with a mysterious American girl named Jaci, he contrasts the daily comings and goings of his friends and townsmen with the weird inner world of his own imagination and longing. His hometown of Scotsfield is ominously ordinary and suffering badly from the Troubles, a place where the parish priest’s overtures toward reconciliation are met with contempt from both Catholics and Protestants, and where the town councilors are more likely concerned with money laundering than property taxes. After a local detective is murdered, Joey is arrested and sent to prison in Dublin, where he begins keeping a journal and emerges, years later, as a celebrated writer. Although his fate is meant to be hopeful, his impossibly tangled narration and the overall tone of moral squalor overwhelm everything with an impenetrable gloom.
By turns fascinating, repulsive, heartbreaking, and unreadable: probably the greatest mess McCabe has published to date.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-052388-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001
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
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by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996
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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