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IN THE CITY OF SHY HUNTERS

Name: IN THE CITY OF SHY HUNTERS
Author: Tom Spanbauer
ISBN: 0-8021-1691-4

by Tom Spanbauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2001

A haunting and undeniably powerful work marred by its own excesses.

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Sexual abuse, incest, pansexualism, and Native American spirituality—explored so well by Spanbauer in the cult favorite The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon (1991)—combine with early–AIDS-era New York for a work that’s utterly fresh but crammed with enough characters, subplots, coincidences, and romances to keep several telenovelas churning for years.

Will Parker may stutter and be both sexually confused and dysfunctional, but he’s a real people magnet. Having escaped provincial Jackson Hole for 1983 Manhattan, he’s not five minutes at LaGuardia before he’s hooked up with Two Shots, a Native American van-driver, and Ruby, his gay male side-kick; in no time they’ve settled Will into his Lower East Side digs and themselves into his life. East Fifth Street is crowded with the requisite New Yorkers of fiction: across the hall is a mad cat-lady, upstairs is Rose, the tough African-American drag queen/performance artist with a heart of gold, and downstairs is the junkie superintendent. Hackneyed types to be sure, but with sharp dialogue and details, Spanbauer infuses them with new life. Waiting tables, Will meets Fiona, a rough-mouthed, Greenwich, Connecticut, would-be artiste who takes Will under her wing and under the sheets. There’s plenty of graphic, although not gratuitous, sex as Will trades experience and love for self-knowledge. As 1983 moves on to ’84 and ’85, AIDS takes over: co-workers die, friends disappear, Rose—now a lover of Will’s—sickens, Fiona’s two brothers die. The slow slide into the world of the epidemic, with its sense of unreality and despair, has never been better realized. But there’s too much more going on here: a murder, a squatters’ riot in a local park, cultural repatriation, and Elizabeth Taylor, arriving for a slow dance with her best friend Rose. Will’s occasional and abrupt flights into magical realism only serve to make the story—already saddled with superfluous, undisciplined subplots—feel more out of control.

A haunting and undeniably powerful work marred by its own excesses.

Pub Date: June 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-8021-1691-4

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
NOW IS THE HOUR
by Tom Spanbauer

- BOOK REVIEW
THE MAN WHO FELL IN LOVE WITH THE MOON
by Tom Spanbauer

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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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.