Bland prose and long stretches of trivial, repetitive dialogue: a banal and tepid fifth from Lewis (Second Draft of My Life,...
Middle-aged musician starts over.
Tending bar and living on royalties from long-ago hits, Tom Good doesn’t think much about his glory days in rock ’n’ roll—until a blast from the past on a store’s piped-in soundtrack knocks him for a loop. He sure wishes he could go to the drugstore and supermarket without hearing memory-triggers for everything he’s tried to forget. Gee, whatever happened to Diana, his true love? Her conditioner smelled excellent. Took him forever to throw the bottle out after she left him. According to his buddy Kevin, Diane is the single mother of a fifth-grader—a boy who looks just like Tom (and who’s known as “Good”). Heck, you mean Diana had his kid and never told him? Is that why she went away without a word of explanation? Should he start acting like a father or what? But his son Jack doesn’t want anything to do with his long-lost dad, and the kid isn’t even musical. And Diana would rather sigh a lot than explain much, anyway. So Good goes back to being nice to the old lady upstairs and to the neighbor’s kids, back to just living his life and stuff. But, hey, Diana is thinking of getting married. Is this new guy going to be Jack’s dad and cut Good out of the picture or what? How not-fair is that? Well, okay, so what can he do? Be a knight in shining armor for the old lady and hook up with the just-dumped mother of the next-door gang, that’s what. They start making quilts and whatnot. It’s a metaphor or something. Gee.
Bland prose and long stretches of trivial, repetitive dialogue: a banal and tepid fifth from Lewis (Second Draft of My Life, 2002, etc.).Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-3671-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
The fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48882-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
An effective, uniformly controlled collection of ten stories from the author of, most recently, Cat's Eye (1989). Gathered here are pieces previously appearing in top short- story forums—The New Yorker, Granta, Saturday Night, Playboy—providing an excellent sampling of high-proof Atwood. Virtually all the pieces focus on the lives of women equivocally connected to the men around them. In "Wilderness Tips," a middle-aged woman is bluntly confronted with her husband's infidelity. "Hairball," the most disturbing here, involves the dissolution of a woman's affair with a married man; the otherwise naturalistic posture of the story is powerfully undercut by the presence of a removed tumor that the young lady keeps in a jar, eventually sending it, neatly wrapped, to her lover's wife. In "True Trash," a young woman encounters a youth who is still unaware that he had impregnated a camp employee many years earlier. And "Hack Wednesday" revolves around a disgruntled journalist brought, whimsically, to the brink of an affair before she backs off—not from any pangs of conscience but out of lethargic concern for the work involved in carrying it off. Like Alice Munro, Atwood has a talent for serving up the nuances of bourgeois Ontario culture, but with Atwood the ingredients are boiled down into a stronger and much more acerbic brew. The author's trademark smirk behind the economical prose can be wearying over the course of an entire collection, but taken separately, the pieces here are solid evidence of the author in full form. Pure Atwood.
Pub Date: Dec. 3, 1991
ISBN: 1841957984
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
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