The flabby plot is encrusted with jewels on every page. And if the race for city council can barely hold the candidate’s...
Beatty follows up the scorched-earth Afro-American satire of The White Boy Shuffle (1996) with an equally antic look at a brother from East Harlem who runs for City Council.
A tree grows in Brooklyn, but it’s no place for Winston (Tuffy) Foshay, first glimpsed coming around from a fainting fit that providentially took him out of the line of fire that terminated both his employment and his employers in a drug den in The Other Borough. What Winston needs, he soon decides, is some comforts a little closer to home: the loving arms of his wife Yolanda, joined to him in holy matrimony via a dial-a-preacher conference call to his prison ward; the inarticulate embraces of his son Bryce Extraordinaire (Jordy) Foshay; the bemused guidance of his fledgling Big Brother, Rabbi Spencer Throckmorton; the usual round of good-natured tussling with the men and women of East 109th Street; and maybe a political fling. The mad idea is Winston’s; the mad money behind it ($15,000, which he thinks of as three months of summer work at $5,000 a month) comes from aging Japanese activist Inez Nomura; but the waggish campaign slogans and strategies seem to sprout from every street corner in the ’hood. Billing himself as “ambivalent on drugs, guns, and alcohol in the community, against cats in the supermercados,” and “anti-cop, anti-cop, anti-cop,” Winston, who knows everyone in the district, doesn’t seem to ignite much more fervor than Steve Forbes, his equally surreal real-life opposite. Even Beatty himself seems no better able than his short-attention-span hero to focus on the election, which keeps getting elbowed aside by rollicking riffs on three-card monte, tales of inner-city white ethnics and black transvestites, and a gorgeous black/Jewish insult match.
The flabby plot is encrusted with jewels on every page. And if the race for city council can barely hold the candidate’s attention, that’s the punch line of Beatty’s richest joke. (First printing of 40,000)Pub Date: May 4, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40122-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
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
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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