Another sensitive examination of universal emotions in the hearts of affluent WASPs from Robinson, in a novel that depicts a second marriage imperiled by offspring from the first. When Emma Goodwin and Peter Chatfield fall in love in 1984, both are recently divorced and feeling guilty because they initiated the break-ups. Emma’s ex-husband, Warren (the book’s only crudely drawn portrait), is a manipulative brute who uses their three-year-old daughter, Tess, as a weapon; social-climbing Caroline Chatfield, devastated by Peter’s departure, feels a vindictiveness toward him that only exacerbates seven-year-old Amanda’s sullenness and rage. When Peter and Emma marry, it’s clear that the stage is set for disaster, though the grim denouement takes eight years to arrive. As in her short fiction (Asking for Love, 1996, etc.), Robinson expertly delineates complex interactions among people, charting the ebb and flow of passions, the revision of opinions as her characters learn and mature. There are no villains (not even Warren), just fallible human beings whose mistakes sometimes have permanent consequences. Amanda’s behavior worsens as she enters her teens, and Peter’s misguided attempts to force her to be part of his new family only deepen her alienation; and well-intentioned Emma, rejected over and over again, finds her marriage battered by her inability to love her stepdaughter. This unhappy impasse is shattered by an automobile accident that shocks all the protagonists out of their frozen attitudes. Robinson’s carefully honed techniques aren’t quite as effective here as in her stories; instead of a few key epiphanies that illuminate a short text, she loads her full-length narrative with so many instances of the characters musing on their relationships and their feelings that the insights occasionally seem obvious and excessive. These flaws, though, are transcended in the moving final chapters, which show people we care about groping toward reconciliation and renewal. A thoughtful, tender tale by one of our finest exponents of traditional realistic fiction.
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-43901-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
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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