The faint but persistent acrid undertone of Miller's best-seller of last season, The Good Mother (its popular focus, a child-abuse custody case), dominates these 11 short stories in which an unhappy mix of divorced or partner-hopping lovers and parents—both young and middle-aged, all middle class—fumble at self-determination, with random grabs at status or security or, simply, drama in a drifting life. Miller's people—most of them vaguely bothered most of the time—when it comes to a grip on the Good Life, are all thumbs. In the title story, a young man becomes obsessed with the daughters of the richest man in his tiny midwestern town, since, fatherless early, and with a distracted mother, he needed a status-y "sense of place." Yet like the mother in "The Abbotts," who will watch her son lope foolishly after bogus American status, the young grandmother in "Leaving Home," living within the miserable marriage of her son, knows that she has "no power to stave off ruin. . .to guard her son against his share of pain." Meanwhile, women court depression; in "Slides," yesterday's nude photos, which stirred an ex-husband, only underscore time past with an aging lover; and in "Travel," a woman traveling in a small South American country, with a deal-making, exploitative lover, capitulates lo American privilege and self-loathing. And men strut in foolish sexual rituals: one is a telephone freak who, at the close, is repeatedly ringing a recorded message; and a "man who loved women" sleeps with two, feeling, since he was passionately involved, that he was "faithful to both." The story of a young mother who wanders from the boring bed of her eighth lover to assemble her son's toy train ("Expensive Gifts") contains the central image, as the disconnected cars (like disconnected families) have a way of magnetically repelling one another when clumsily manipulated. An adventurous, chilly collection of stories, some with a John Cheever-ish bite, about uncoupled lives rattling on into isolation.
Pub Date: May 1, 1987
ISBN: 0060157550
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1987
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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