A short, resonant novel of masculinity and fatherhood.
Thorpe’s novel tells the story of a man in crisis on a pilgrimage to Hemingway’s grave.
Wes Haas is a novelist and professor challenged by the academy on his definition of “literary” and his inability to intuit the meaning of “competence.” In response, Haas has undertaken a road trip to Ketchum, Idaho, to see the grave of Ernest Hemingway, his earliest and most important influence as a writer. On the way, he picks up his son, Linus, a 13-year-old Haas hasn’t seen in nearly a year who lives with Haas’ ex-wife in Montana. As he rolls through the small towns of the northwestern United States, Haas is confronted with the myriad ghosts of his present and past: his failed marriage, his stagnant career, and his relationship with a mercurial ballet dancer named Aletheia. The result is a mashup of campus novel and road book, a movable inquiry into the crafts of writing and life, and a quest for, as the title implies, competence. The premise may seem a bit clumsy: readers may wonder if Hemingway isn’t the sort of writer whom the young are meant to love but then outgrow. Thorpe attempts to address this issue early on: “By reading short stories like ‘Big Two Hearted River’ and ‘Now I Lay Me,’ Haas learned the value of actual words that exist on the flattened sheet of paper, not merely intended ones…his pilgrimage to Hemingway’s grave did not then seem a stupid cliché to him, but a fitting tribute to a human being who had changed his life.” Even so, Thorpe isn’t doing the expected Hemingway impression of staccato lines and muscular prose (though Haas’ present narrative is intercut with flashbacks from his past rendered in Hemingway-esque italics). This is a novel about attempting to move beyond one’s influences and even moving beyond one’s past mistakes. Though the ghost of Hemingway hangs heavily over the book, Thorpe manages to carve out some admirable literary territory of his own. The reader discovers not a larger-than-life Papa Hemingway, but a relatable man coming to terms with his own adequacy in a world of vague expectations.
A short, resonant novel of masculinity and fatherhood.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1503133808
Page Count: 218
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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