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THE TOURNAMENT

A NOVEL OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Who wins? Find out for yourself, and be dazzled along the way as, thanks to the indefatigable Clarke, you also brush up on...

Australian Clarke’s first US publication is a genius-touched tour de farce that imagines the 20th-century’s intellectual giants competing in the biggest tennis tournament ever held.

The contest, in Paris, goes on for 36 days, one chapter per each, with amusements major and minor abounding from the start. Here are some arrivals, for example: “Buster Keaton was catapulted in from Belgium, Escher arrived through the departure lounge, Dali came by overnight post and Alice Toklas sent herself as an attachment. Einstein said he had come by tram. ‘But there is no tram to Paris,’ corrected George Plimpton . . . . ‘That might account for the time lapse,’ Einstein explained.” And so it goes, for 35 more days, in a wondrously comic tumult of personalities, anachronisms, jokes—and, of course, tennis. The sportswriter’s tone is just-right irreverent—as when “Bertie Russell” plays “the Spockster” (that’s the doctor), or James Joyce goes against “SuperTom” Eliot. Clarke’s one-liners can be sharp as SuperTom’s aces: “Not bad,” says Virginia Stephen-Woolf, “But it would be nice to get a boom of one’s own”; “I was lucky,” says Beckett; “ ‘Marlene [Dietrich] looked great today,’ said Pavlova. ‘I was lucky to get on top of her.’ ” All is not jocular, though. Paul Robeson leaves his country; Rosa Luxemburg is murdered; “Amelia Earhart is also missing”; “Bessie Smith never made it to the hospital”; and Anna Akhmatova “disappeared from the circuit.” Still, amid the century’s tragedies, humor persists, some of it biographic and scientific (“Wodehouse and Isherwood have departed for the US. Einstein left yesterday, last night and again this morning”), tons of it literary (“Eliot was now cautioned for banging his raquet on the ground and yelling ‘Jug, jug, jug, fucking juuuuuugggggg!”), with author Clarke even showing his own stuff in some wonderfully sensitive parodies of the styles of the greats.

Who wins? Find out for yourself, and be dazzled along the way as, thanks to the indefatigable Clarke, you also brush up on last century’s intellectual history.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2003

ISBN: 1-4013-0092-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003

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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Life lessons.

Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Pub Date: July 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-345-46750-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004

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SEE ME

More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose...

Sparks (The Longest Ride, 2013, etc.) serves up another heaping helping of sentimental Southern bodice-rippage.

Gone are the blondes of yore, but otherwise the Sparks-ian formula is the same: a decent fellow from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches falls in love with a decent girl from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches—and is still suffering the consequences. The guy is innately intelligent but too quick to throw a punch, the girl beautiful and scary smart. If you hold a fatalistic worldview, then you’ll know that a love between them can end only in tears. If you hold a Sparks-ian one, then true love will prevail, though not without a fight. Voilà: plug in the character names, and off the story goes. In this case, Colin Hancock is the misunderstood lad who’s decided to reform his hard-knuckle ways but just can’t keep himself from connecting fist to face from time to time. Maria Sanchez is the dedicated lawyer in harm’s way—and not just because her boss is a masher. Simple enough. All Colin has to do is punch the partner’s lights out: “The sexual harassment was bad enough, but Ken was a bully as well, and Colin knew from his own experience that people like that didn’t stop abusing their power unless someone made them. Or put the fear of God into them.” No? No, because bound up in Maria’s story, wrinkled with the doings of an equally comely sister, there’s a stalker and a closet full of skeletons. Add Colin’s back story, and there’s a perfect couple in need of constant therapy, as well as a menacing cop. Get Colin and Maria to smooching, and the plot thickens as the storylines entangle. Forget about love—can they survive the evil that awaits them out in the kudzu-choked woods?

More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose corn syrup, stickily sweet but irresistible.

Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-4555-2061-9

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

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