In McInerney’s debut sci-fi novel, the spirit of Benjamin Franklin teaches a young man how to cleanse his neighbors’ psyches of “evil bulges.”
College student Jake undergoes a near-death experience after a local bully drugs his drink. In his subsequent dream, a man named Oswaldo arrives on a “magic-carpet-like platform” to whisk Jake away to purgatory, where none other than Benjamin Franklin is waiting to show him around. McInerney’s overly complex metaphysical netherworld includes guardian angels, who access humans through a “Limbic Highway” to their brains. It turns out that the souls in purgatory, Franklin included, have big plans for Jake in their quest to defeat evil. They plan to use a Mobile Cleansing Unit, or M-C-U (one of the novel’s many acronyms), to eradicate dreaded “evil bulges,” which “evil barbs” create in people’s minds. Franklin shows Jake the ropes on how to destroy the bulges; in future dreams, Jake returns to help the cause, entering his neighbors’ dreams in Magic School Bus–like adventures to clean evil from their neural pools. When Jake isn’t going after evil, however, he lives a sheltered life—one so uneventful that McInerney manages to find space in this short novel for Jake to comment on the weather: “If it is one thing I cannot handle, it’s humidity. There is no solution when you’re in it, except to get out of it.” The novel offers an intriguing take on the afterlife that has potential. However, it suffers from a lack of conflict; it only takes a bit of extra firepower to dispatch the evil bulges, for example, and few characters are developed enough to contain conflicts beyond their supposed moral failings. A teenage girl named Tina, for example, is said to have been “snowed over by her family so often, that she ignores the ramifications of an unplanned pregnancy, and believes that premarital sex is acceptable.” Few passages in the book allow readers to make their own judgments about the characters’ actions, and even fewer attempt to explain its strange mythology.
A compelling idea for a novel that suffers from bizarre worldbuilding, a slight plot and underdeveloped characters.
Pub Date: April 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0982468500
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Saunal Publishing Inc.
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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