A haunting and keenly observed meditation on relationships, parenthood, and the vagaries of celebrity and fame.
After his girlfriend discovers she is pregnant, a screenwriter and director experiences something that may be a miracle in this novel.
In the 1980s, David Lang captured the cult movie zeitgeist with the low-budget Zombie Film School. The work’s success brought fame, fortune, and marriage to an actress named Rosamundo. Two sequels follow, but by the mid-1990s, David’s marriage ends and he moves to California with his girlfriend, Holly Markham, and works as a script doctor. A writer and singer, Holly enchants David with her beauty and intelligence. In late 1998, Holly discovers she is unexpectedly pregnant. At age 42, she figures this may be her last opportunity to become a mother, but she is ambivalent about the prospect of parenthood. One night, David has a vision of an ethereally beautiful young girl at the head of their bed. The vision is brief but profound, and he wonders if he has seen an angel. While they struggle to decide whether to continue with the pregnancy, David prepares to turn his film script The Blemish into a play. When circumstances prompt them to return to New York, David and Holly are faced with pivotal choices that will affect the future of their relationship. The latest novel from Fife (The 13th Boy, 2014, etc.) is a thoughtful and compulsively readable portrait of a man facing intense changes in his career and life. Told through David’s journal entries and excerpts from his unfinished novel, Accident of Nature, the narrative is inventive and fast-paced. The tale primarily centers on David and Holly and the effect of her pregnancy on their relationship. The question of whether or not to have the baby is complicated by Holly’s struggle with depression. Her story is explored with candor and nuance as her moods shift wildly on a daily basis. In one poignant moment, Holly tells her doctor, “I’m just trying not to drown.” David’s experiences as a script doctor and his efforts to revive his career with the play The Blemish provide well-timed, darkly comic moments.
A haunting and keenly observed meditation on relationships, parenthood, and the vagaries of celebrity and fame.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61457-246-6
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Cune
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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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