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Any Resemblance To A Coincidence Is Accidental

An offbeat work of carnivalesque proportions, populated by zany, outspoken, and eccentric personalities.

An ambitious book offers an amalgam of opinion, satire, and character sketch.  

Armed with a brain-teasingly bizarre title that foretells its peculiar contents, this volume features a chorus of quirky voices chanting messages of solidarity, gay pride, and anti-homogeneous individualism. The book opens with an anonymous woman’s exquisitely sarcastic rant parodying a social media outlet (“Fakebook”), accusing it of “destroying friendship,” and musing over the digital impermanence of modern culture and communication. She considers herself an “incredible fag hag.” After pondering the significance of fetishes and Nueva Jork life, she acerbically introduces her artistic, gay “fiend-frienemy” Noloso Chushingura and launches a literary fever-dream of colorfully dizzying co-narrators and their sordid escapades. Noloso is a man who is abandoning his longtime residence in “Disneyfied” Nueva Jork for his childhood home, Mucha Nieve. Unsatisfied still, he flees there for wintry “Palin-town,” where no-nonsense, pragmatic Pavlina Perestroika gets into a mysterious 1975 Buick Regal and begins an otherworldly journey to another land yet returns just in time for Bobby Bluetooth’s comedy set at a nearby cafe. Readers searching for some cohesive link to the stories and their kaleidoscope of curious characters may become dumbfounded by the time lesbian Koontessa Klarissa Koontberger introduces her two adopted children “of indeterminate sexuality.” Giovanni Zsazsasky exchanges gay bars for eBay shopping as the ultimate “go-to pacifier in moments of thumb-sucking sadness,” and wand-waving superheroine Dolores The Day-Glo Drag Queen issues orders commanding the end of abusive Jean-Nette The Jet Lag Fag Hag’s life. This is the third book by Canadian fiction writer and visual artist Bird (Hideous Exuberance, 2013, etc.). Thankfully, lurking beneath all of the snarky commentary and cheekiness are honest reflections of contemporary society, including the gay community’s struggle to vanquish shame and the much-protested incremental gentrification of major metropolitan areas. Not all of this oddly creative volume works, however, with some sections dissolving into garbled gibberish and others becoming overpowered by all of Bird’s slapdash wackiness. Overall, the book’s unconventional spellings, sentence fragments, line-drawn chapter headings, and haiku work well in unison to create a devilishly original tableau of true outlandishness with a conscience.

An offbeat work of carnivalesque proportions, populated by zany, outspoken, and eccentric personalities.

Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-692-34777-5

Page Count: 258

Publisher: Hysterical Dementia

Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016

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SUMMER ISLAND

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

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LAST ORDERS

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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