THIS SIDE OF ETERNITY

From the author of One Better (1997), etc., a sprawling, badly written rags-to-riches saga of a black family from Memphis.

It’s 1968, and 13-year-old Anne Russell’s union-activist father has been swallowed by a garbage truck on the eve of a sanitation workers’ strike. Accident or murder? No one knows. Anne and older sibs Mae and Kirk lost their mother years earlier, but they manage to stay together now and even take in a few orphaned nieces and nephews, including budding artist Bentley and her mildly retarded, epileptic sister, Nikkie. Despite vicious physical and emotional abuse from Mae, they all grow up somehow amidst the political and racial strife of the 1960s and ’70s. Idealistic Anne joins the civil rights movement and later marries Scott Hamilton, spoiled scion of a wealthy newspaper-owning clan. Scott beats her, and their son Basil is given to pranks like dissolving his gerbils in liquid Drano when not bullying his sister Holly. But Anne is a faithful wife, coping nobly when a sudden stroke leaves Scott paralyzed and mute. Upon his death, a mysterious white woman appears. Wicked, beautiful, man-eating Isabell Ford, once jilted by Scott, turns out to be responsible for almost every bad thing that happens to the Russells. She seduces and corrupts Basil, who skims millions from his state-subsidized chain of daycare centers to finance his gambling addiction. Just out of spite, Isabell also marries the father of Bentley’s love child after Bentley suffers a catastrophic mental breakdown. Infuriated by Basil’s eventual rejection, Isabell then sends a hit man to kill him, but his sister dies instead. Really stressed by now, Anne develops Parkinson’s disease but is cured by a honeymoon trip to Lourdes with her new love, a devout Catholic. And then . . .

Loose ends and non sequiturs galore in a cheesy plot, written in just plain awful prose. A breathtakingly bad soap opera.