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I HOPE PERSONALITIES AREN'T HEREDITARY

Name: I HOPE PERSONALITIES AREN'T HEREDITARY
Author: Vincent M. Monteleone
ISBN: 978-1-5466-0207-1

A ROMP THROUGH THE DECADE THAT TOOK US FROM MARTINI'S TO MARIJUANA

by Vincent M. Monteleone ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 25, 2017

This book paints a believable, if occasionally lackluster, picture of turbulent American lives.

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A debut novel chronicles one family’s mishaps in the 1960s.

This story begins with Frank Bellincioni explaining to his 12-year-old great-nephew, Michael, that, despite outward appearances, their family has not always been as upstanding as it might seem. Michael imagines no one in the clan has ever done anything “dangerous or exciting,” though Frank insists it is one “bat-shit crazy tribe.” Frank then recounts the tribe’s colorful history. In 1958, he, his parents, and his two siblings move from Chicago to the nearby suburb of Prospect Heights. Although Prospect Heights is only 45 minutes out of the city, it is nearly a world away from what they know. While dealing with life “in the middle of nowhere” is not easy, they begin to cope. Frank’s father becomes a bartender with a side gig as a bookie, and Frank’s mother makes dresses, though at one point the local police suspect she is running a brothel. Along with the family’s relocation come the changing times of the ’60s. Frank even finds himself involved in the protests outside of the 1968 Democratic Convention, and his eighth-grade trip to Washington, D.C., winds up engulfed in raunchy, sexual liberation-era pandemonium. They are stories not just of a city family’s adjustment to suburban life, but also of that clan’s attempts to keep up with the world around it. Some of Monteleone’s tales deftly illustrate a bygone era, as when Frank’s brother goes behind his parents’ backs to change the specifications on his custom-ordered 1964 Buick Skylark. Other events, such as Frank’s father falling through a plasterboard ceiling, might play well at a family reunion but they do not garner much excitement in a work of fiction. The stories are relayed in a conversational, slightly crude style, as when Frank explains how his parents made sure his siblings “got their butts to church every Sunday” and how Pat Booth, one of his mother’s friends, hypnotized men with her “incredible rack.” Such a style produces a captivating air of authenticity, and the reader is likely to feel at least some connection with this family caught up in tempestuous times.

This book paints a believable, if occasionally lackluster, picture of turbulent American lives.

Pub Date: July 25, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-5466-0207-1

Page Count: 138

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2017

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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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.

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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SAG HARBOR

by Colson Whitehead ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 28, 2009

Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.

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Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.

Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.

Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.