Absolutely brilliant, and deeply moving.
Five interconnected tales from Whitbread-winner Cusk (The Country Life, 1999, etc.), centered on the fraught bonds between parents and children.
The currently fashionable tactic of unifying a short-story collection by loosely relating the characters can seem like a gimmick, but Cusk weaves her tapestry ever-tighter toward a climax that will send readers back to the earlier sections to marvel at the subtle artistry that has planted throughout seeds that bear full fruit only at the end. She begins, in the sardonically titled “Confinement,” with a pregnant woman in an English jail, convicted of murder and faced with the prospect of losing her baby once she gives birth. The scene shifts in “The Way You Do It” to the Alps, where an ill-assorted group are on a skiing holiday that only underscores the ambivalence of the three characters who are new parents. “I mean, I love them and everything,” says one, “but sometimes I think, God, whatever happened to our life?” The protagonist of “The Sacrifices,” pressured by her previously married husband to forego having a child, realizes too late she’s been psychologically abused by him as she was by her mother. The glancing connections among the characters only truly make sense in the superb two stories that close the collection: the terrifying “Mrs. Daley’s Daughter,” with its mordant view inside the head of a monstrous mother who always thinks she’s the one being hurt; and the keening “Matters of Life and Death,” in which an overwhelmed young woman whose husband wanted a stay-at-home wife and mother sees him turn around and say, “This family thing. Six years. Six years . . . I’m dying.” A neighbor who writes a feminist newspaper column about raising children and her dying husband, a crusading lawyer, provide the thematic link that ties it all together with an emotional wallop all the more devastating for being rendered in Cusk’s quiet, understated prose, with its delicately detailed rendering of the ebb and flow of human thought and feeling. In particular, her portrait of mothers’ deeply conflicted attitudes toward their young children perfectly captures the primal love and the despairing sense of total inadequacy in the face of their all-consuming demands.
Absolutely brilliant, and deeply moving.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-00-716131-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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