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GO WEST YOUNG F*CKED-UP CHICK

Hollywood first novel, bravely bizarre and splintered as a mosaic, like pieces of Bruce Wagner and Nathanael West glued into a window sunlit with despair. Well, what does a 20-year-old heroine, who finds her suicidal, alcoholic mother hanging by her neck in the bathroom, have going for her? Not much. So Rebecca Roth gets into her shamefully beat-up yellow Toyota Corolla and drives cross-country to L.A., where she falls for super-charismatic black stud/French scholar Isaac, supports him with her $120-a-week job assisting celebrity reporter Darlene on Entertainment Tonight, visits sound-stages, helps locate celebs at parties, sits pretty with Austrian muscle-man Arnold (known here as Helmut Grosskopf), finds herself pregnant on the same day as she kicks out Isaac—and then must get an abortion. If that sounds like a storyline, it isn’t. The novel is pieced together in fragments, some only a third of a page long, giving us an airless, spirit-choking survey of stars, restaurants, and Rebecca’s largely lowlife existence: “I was exultant. Even breathed the thick poison, liked the way it filled my throat.” Reluctantly, she briefly tries therapy for abused children of alcoholic parents, not thinking herself abused, yet haunted by grungy, horrible dreams of her dead mother. Sleeping with kooks and a rocker from the Meat Puppets, fielding paranoid phone calls, encountering a middle-aged nut in the Laundromat who thinks he’s Gene Autry’s son and has a postcard of Gene to prove it, Rebecca fails to make much sense of the nightmarish Day-Glo landscape forever bopping the reader’s eyes, billboards, shaved palm trees, all in a technicarnal brilliance . An apocalyptic Wiley Coyote cartoon, or a lipstick kiss on a napkin kept in a bureau as a souvenir of hapless days when you were underpaid, little-known, and shivering.

Pub Date: April 8, 1999

ISBN: 0-312-19889-2

Page Count: 256

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999

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FIREFLY LANE

Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...

Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.

Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?

Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3

Page Count: 496

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007

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LAST ORDERS

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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