A somewhat stiff but nonetheless poignant meditation on a hard-drinking WASP family's unrealized promise and collective denial, by the author of Make-Believe Ballrooms (1989) and Highlights of the Off-Season, 1986. ``Jam'' Knowles, almost 40 and recently separated from his wife, breaks into the island home, off the southeastern coast of New England, where he summered as a boy to spend a few days with his memories. As teenagers, the five Knowles kids were jovial and attractive, unexceptional but well-schooled, enthusiastic participants in family rituals and smug in their trust- fundsupported sense of entitlement. Their lively mother and their father, a legendary teacher at the upper-crust Emery School, packed the house with other Emery teachers, and even the drunken weekends, with their disturbing glimpses of adult excesses (vomiting, tantrums, extramarital flirtations) are, for adult Jam, cast in sunny nostalgia. The problem is that none of the Knowles siblings is thriving. Jay, bland and overbearing as a kid, bullies his wife and child. Sarah, once icy and popular, now veers between eccentricity and bitterness. Tom, who's always had vaguely mystical leanings, has ditched the family and become a commercial fisherman. Unpleasant Sam brags about the celebrities at his AA meetings, between nasty bouts of falling off the wagon. Meantime, Father's efforts at communication are tentative at best; Mother stays merrily sloshed. Jam ruminates on his disappointments (his lack of talent as a jazz pianist, for instance), and on deaths, fights, and extremely infrequent moments of connection with his emotionally stunted father, until his estranged wife materializes to help him turn his numbness into mourning. The island remains generic despite much description, and the characters, with the exception of Father, are one-dimensional. But Smith's renditions of the family's dreadful reunions—boozy holiday meals, efforts at humor and generosity that fall flat, the needling and sniping and the hopeless attempts at festivity—are complex and filled with resonant detail. Despite some flat patches, then, a dead-on portrait of family unhappiness.
Pub Date: Sept. 4, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-47787-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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