Faust's novels were well-received in the 1970s, but he couldn't find a publisher in the '80s. Now he delivers his third novel in two years (When She Was Bad, 1994, etc.)—a murder story on which he hangs a broad satire of the contemporary US. Ted Moon is a pitcher for a New York team more or less like the hapless Mets of several years ago. He's talented but has a history of violent behavior, alcoholic blackouts, and long, insane recovery periods at a remote hospital in New Mexico. Unlike Faust's In the Forest of the Night (1993), a meticulously plotted tale set in Central America, Faust's latest has almost no story. Moon is accused of murdering four transsexuals, and to escape arrest he takes off cross-country on a manic binge, finally establishing his innocence—of murder, at least—and rejoining his team in Los Angeles. The reader never really thinks Moon committed the murders. Faust's baseball episodes, the few that there are, are nicely rendered, no doubt because Faust was a professional ballplayer himself. But his interest is in Moon's wild, often hilarious send- ups of sexuality (a sports psychologist who counsels baseball players to plumb their feminine sides and not to be afraid of touching one another), feminism, tabloid journalism (which feeds the public appetite for salaciousness by treating intimate sexual subjects in a ``scientific'' manner), and every species of political correctness—which he gives us while watching TV, ``the black hole,'' in motel after motel. The novel is sharp, sometimes reactionary satire rather like Kingsley Amis at his most vicious, delivered in a circular, mocking, high-flying harangue. Incensed by one of his ex-wives' sensible refusal to let him visit his children, he says, ``It was not the lack of justice that I minded; it was the lack of shame for the lack of justice.'' Faust could be criticized for his indifferent plotting, but Ted Moon's outrageous manic tirade is strong medicine: hits hard, but has a tonic effect.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-85398-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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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