Not many story collections include an introduction by the author, but Howell clearly thinks readers need to be prepared for the wildly different subjects (and styles) on display in his first volume, some parts of which have appeared in various small magazines. Howell argues for an urban/rural dialectic here, but the city pieces seem less defined by place than by a shared voice: An angry male, done wrong by his women and venting his spleen in vile language. Three tales are also linked by the presence of Veronica, an unstable, obsessive woman who renews her sexual relation with the narrator in a Brooklyn restaurant bathroom (``In the Bathroom at Joey's Restaurant''). He eventually writes a letter (``Dear Veronica'') demanding the return of a favorite sweater, then takes his own obsessiveness a bit further when he breaks into her apartment and masturbates on her underwear and sheets (``Unction''). Howell plumbs bitter love in many guises: a stream- of-consciousness riff on a fickle woman that alternates between abusive language about her and civil telephone chatter with her (the title story); an anecdotal piece describing a date with a drunk (``A Date''); and another date story, this with a married woman the narrator hopes to bed (``Dinner''). Experimental bits include some formless verse on grief (``The Pink Clouds Are Blood''), and a bizarre little love story between a wildebeest and a jellyfish (``Willie and Jackie''). Two hilarious bits update the stories of La Bohäme and Oedipus, the first as a contemporary tale of a bulimic bohemian in Paris, the second set in a small modern Illinois town. Six stories, all similar in voice, are set in a rural South of outrageous, over-the-top shenanigans involving liquor, women, and low-comic antics, the best being the record of a hilarious drunken Passion Play in the longish ``My Education,'' a tale offering inspired goofiness on a par with T.R. Pearson. On balance: too many disagreeable and disposable pieces detract from some solid storytelling.
Pub Date: June 12, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14414-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
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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