A chance incident brings racial and marital tensions on Long Island to a head in this first installment of a debut series.
Former golf wunderkind Buddy Graves never planned to return to his old club as a caddy at age 32, but the recession had other ideas. Now he’s just trying to hold fast to his lovely nurse wife, Dana, while watching his neighborhood crumble in the housing bust. Then it happens: a 7-year-old girl who lives next door slips innocently into Buddy’s bathroom, he hustles her outside, a cell phone camera snaps and one Tyrell Walker embarks on a twisted crusade for “Webtribution” and racial justice. But that’s not Buddy’s only problem. Dominating the country club scene is Izzy Weinberg, nursing home baron, and his still-sexy wife, Elaine, with whom Buddy enjoyed a steamy flirtation on the links years ago. Izzy harbors Carnegie-style railroad dreams, boozes up Chinese business partners and keeps a smart young assistant working late under his covers. The web tightens when Dana joins a health task force investigating Izzy’s empire, and then her muckracking blogger gal pal posts a damning photo of a black activist professor—with connections to Tyrell—in company of the wrong color. So unfolds this smartly structured soap opera that adroitly lampoons our postmodern smugness. If we really want to explode stereotypes of rich Jews, femmes fatales, Asian power brokers, radicalized black brothers and white jocks whose lives crashed long ago, why not throw them together for high stakes and watch the sparks and clichés fly? Gritty vernacular rules the book, with heavy doses of ghetto talk and enough N-bombs and F-bombs to supply a platoon. The women seem a tad interchangeable, but they serve just fine as beautiful causes that launch men to insane states of desire. And sometimes, of course, ambition really is a bitch. At least one dream gets reborn at the novel’s end, with further complications and unsavory revelations promised in book two. Bring it on. A cleverly threaded melodrama with a raunchy style and enough secrets, sex and culture clashes to keep the pages turning.
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463606312
Page Count: 318
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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