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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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