Tales too wispy to capture gay life—or death, either, in its different guises.
Ten debut stories, spanning a period of 18-plus years, show a gay-oriented child on the one hand, and a gay adult on the other, yet they don’t cohere satisfyingly.
At first our unnamed narrator is in sixth grade, in the 1950s, living with his parents and older brother, Davis, in suburban Maryland. Along with his best friend, Denny, he likes to sneak into his mother’s bedroom and try on her dresses. He feels “beautiful, and guilty.” Then his mother finds out, and the narrator hates the exiled Denny—it’s easier than hating himself. In these early stories, the narrator is a “Momma’s boy,” while Davis pals around with their father (whose sudden death from hepatitis will be awkwardly shoehorned in). Davis does traditional boy stuff, unlike his namby-pamby brother, so it comes as a shock to learn that Davis is shy and fearful in high school, more of a shock when he comes out while the narrator stays in the closet, making for a difficult sibling relationship. Where’s the foreshadowing? The self-destructive Davis will be arrested three times, twice on drug charges, before fatally overdosing at 35. The narrator, with a better instinct for self-preservation, is now “the good son,” though glimpses of his adult life keep us disoriented. In Tangiers, a sexual cornucopia, he’s a shrinking violet, yet in Paris a quickie in a gay movie theater hits the spot. Later still, it emerges that his movie theater partner, Francisco, becomes a lover of sorts, contradicting an initial impression of anonymity. The treatment of an attorney, Eduardo, is similarly slipshod, shown as a long-term lover who unaccountably gets short shrift. Francisco and Eduardo both die of AIDS, as do many others, and in an odd little coda, the narrator and a female coworker who has lost her son join in a remembrance ritual on a lake.
Tales too wispy to capture gay life—or death, either, in its different guises.Pub Date: April 26, 2005
ISBN: 0-679-41176-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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