A creatively original, character-driven companion volume fusing biographical sketches with gay sexuality.
A prequel explores the early lives of four gay men before they dramatically intersected.
Prolific author Jack (A High Country Tale, 2016, etc.) revisits the main characters at the center of his impressive preceding novel and presents their separate histories prior to becoming a close-knit group of friends and lovers. Split into four volumes, the engrossing saga devotes some attention to extraneous details but focuses a great deal on each man’s carnal coming-of-age. The compilation begins with Lucas Cevennes graphically describing his very first same-sex sexual encounter, an event he considers an “introduction to the Devil Incarnate.” Admitting his gay feelings early and spending his youth bound within the strict confines of a Christian upbringing, Luke pines for personal freedom while exploring other boys’ bodies at summer camp—with unrequited teenage affections blindly guided by his bulky “ever-ready snake.” Eventually, he undertakes the challenges of medical school. In the second section, Cal Broadhearst’s Southern youth born “of the blood of Princes” is distinguished by impressive manners and reserved behavior yet marred by episodes of extreme bullying. These attributes produce a refined and savvy black man talented at competitive wrestling and software engineering and masterful at “the erotic boogie and prance” of dance-floor gyrations. Jake Marshall’s third section depicts a bucolic Vermont heritage and a fatherless boyhood spoiled by a mean stepdad though greatly redeemed by male friends and frolicsome fishing trips. He is mentored by a neighboring elderly couple who invest in and promote his future in medicine. At college in Texas, Jake embraces his scholarly prowess and a newfound fondness for same-sex romance after meeting Cal. Jeremy Kell rounds out the vivid profiles as a boy born into an enormous brood of children who raises goats and becomes obsessed with a Jamaican “Rasta Mon.” Later, as a teenage father plagued in his young adulthood with “lonesomeness for a significant peer,” he braves the future with hope for his daughter and a loving male partner for himself. Fans of Jack’s original novel will be delighted to discover the humble and enticing beginnings of these four gay men, their backgrounds, and how their lives progressed up to and including their impactful intersection in A High Country Tale. The author takes his time with all of the quartet’s members, meticulously exploring their internal struggles and early ambitions as well as the ways their young lives become dramatically influenced by latent homosexuality and negatively hobbled by the strict religious leanings of parents and family members. While the narrative does have a tendency to be clunky, overwritten, or just plain cheesy in spots (Luke’s campground sexual curiosity was a “nascent stirring of endocrine undertones providing provocation,” while Cal’s libidinous “cobra informed the higher head”), Jack knows how to illustrate his characters well and make each one engaging on a variety of levels.
A creatively original, character-driven companion volume fusing biographical sketches with gay sexuality.Pub Date: April 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9980990-4-0
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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