Dew never finds a way past the blandness of her nice characters’ lives.
Dew returns to the Scofield family of Washburn, Ohio, in this disappointing sequel to The Evidence Against Her (2001).
The author fast forwards 20 years to focus on the mid-life/mid-20th-century evolution of Agnes Scofield, the outsider who previously married into the Scofield family. Agnes’s beloved but often depressed husband Warren has died in a car accident that she secretly fears was a suicide she could have prevented. Left to raise her four children without the financial resources she expected, she’s become a teacher to maintain their big house. At the start of WWII, her three sons enlist and her daughter takes a job in Washington. Feeling lonely, she carries on a tepid affair with her childhood friend Will and adopts a dog. Though she misses her children, when they return all at once in 1947, she finds readjusting to a full house difficult. Dwight, actually Agnes’s brother but raised as her son, has married the daughter of Robert and Lilly Butler, who figured so prominently in the earlier novel but barely register here. Agnes entertains a brief concern that Dwight’s father might have been a Scofield, in which case his marriage might be incestuous. Her son Claytor brings home a wife from Mississippi whose innocent outspokenness sets local tongues wagging. Daughter Betts shocks Agnes by falling in love with and marrying Will. But she adjusts as she must. Despite her privately held disappointments and frustrations, she loves her children and grandchildren. Unfortunately, the author tells her story from too polite a distance.
Dew never finds a way past the blandness of her nice characters’ lives.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2005
ISBN: 0-316-89004-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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