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
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
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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