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BEYOND THE FIRE

A dizzy whirlwind of a debut thriller that ultimately runs out of air: about the fate of an American soldier trying to return home 25 years after having been listed as missing in action. Do the garroted corpses of employees of the Manhattan-based international arms-dealer Parker Global have anything to do with the savagely wounded hulk of a Colonel Everett Ransom found bleeding in the Vietnamese jungle? First-novelist Salinger suggests a connection as he cuts rapidly between the idyllic paradise of postwar Vietnam and the NYPD Bluelike milieu of Homicide Lieutenant Mel Fink and his partner, Don Barton. As Barton and Fink (their names are juxtaposed, making for a series of campy allusions to the Coen brothers movie) are seduced but not corrupted by various denizens of Parker Global, Colonel Ransom awakens to find himself under the care of Isaac ``Zach'' Johnson, a saintly Army medic who was captured by the Viet Cong and has survived all these years as a village doctor. Ransom vows to take Johnson, and his Vietnamese girlfriend Mee Yang, back to the States—no simple task, thanks to a sky-high pile of thinly brushed bad guys inside Parker Global, the Pentagon, and the news media. Soon, everybody wants to kill Johnson and Ransom, a former bad guy who did secret arms smuggling for Parker Global. Salinger doesn't let any of his microscopically brief chapters end without Hollywood-style ultraviolence, bedroom acrobatics, or a snickering revelation of how nasty some Americans can be. Whatever help such devices might offer, his story still collapses under the corpses of too many interchangeably vile also-rans, while his thesis—that finding out what really happened to our Vietnam vets, POWs, and MIAs is the kind of prayer that God can only answer as a curse—does not convince. A quick, breezy, confusing read that, despite its baggy plot, gratuitous sex, and ditto violence, shows the skills of a writer who is meant for finer things.

Pub Date: Sept. 17, 1997

ISBN: 0-446-52079-9

Page Count: 384

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997

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FIREFLY LANE

Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...

Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.

Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?

Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3

Page Count: 496

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007

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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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