The resolution is a tad facile, but March’s likable first novel is unerringly true in its evocation of Southern mores.
The breakup of his marriage forces a young Southerner to reach back into his family’s past to salvage his identity.
It was all looking so good for Zeb Dupree, eldest son of a North Carolina sharecropper. First in the family to go to college, let alone graduate; the marriage to an influential preacher’s daughter he had thought unattainable; the plum job as editor of a suburban New Orleans paper; the split-level home. Then came the phone call: His father had killed himself. Zeb took the news so hard that he started drinking heavily, lost his job and his wife, Roseanne. We first meet Zeb as he’s returning to his old college town, Cedar Springs in the Piedmont, looking for a band to play with (he’s a fiddler). But the world has moved on. It’s the ’70s now, the hippies are gone, and rock has replaced country. Zeb must settle for washing dishes and painting condos. To his chagrin, his younger brothers L.C. and Merle are now doing better materially than he is, though L.C., a Vietnam vet, is suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. March’s crisply written story weaves in and out of the past. Zeb begins a tentative relationship with a new girlfriend, but he must deal with his father’s suicide before he can move ahead again. Lavis had had a bitterly pessimistic view of life, ever since his brother had cheated him out of his share of the family farm. After that, working another man’s land, Lavis had always feared he would be evicted. Had Lavis resented Zeb’s early success? Zeb must forgive his father before he can become whole again. And then it comes to him: He must buy back the damaged family farm and rebuild his life even as he literally rebuilds the “homeplace.”
The resolution is a tad facile, but March’s likable first novel is unerringly true in its evocation of Southern mores.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-57962-126-0
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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