If James Michener were hipper on music—and everyone from Dylan to Country Joe to Jerry and Janis shows up in Shiner’s...
Sprawling generational novel that takes the flower children of the beautiful 1960s through their paces and deposits them in the ugly world of the Trump-ian teens.
All things, including the title of novelist/music writer Shiner’s (Dark Tangos, 2011, etc.) latest, begin and end with Bob Dylan, author of lyrics that “were the secret handshake, the tap on the shoulder, the beckoning hand from the alleyway.” Jeff Cole, dutiful child of the middle class, is on a scholarship at a fancy-lad school in New York, where he meets a young Mexican, “good-looking and confident,” named Alex Montoya, his family blessed with a vastly larger bank account. “Once you get past a certain point,” Alex shrugs, “being rich is a full-time job all by itself.” Alex knows all there is to know about music and Cole, nothing—so, there in 1965, Alex takes it on himself to induct Cole by means of, yes, “Highway 61 Revisited,” or, as he calls it, “Lesson One.” Cole learns—and does he. Soon he’s playing before adoring crowds, scoring big with the ladies, hitting the road for the Golden Gate and acid sessions with the Dead and the Doors and the Airplane among “runaways, acid-heads and straights, the seekers, the believers, the gawkers, all responding to a desire that didn’t have a name yet." Over hundreds of winningly spun pages, Alex, Cole, and a host of supporting players seek that desire, finding themselves variously here at Woodstock, there on a Virginia commune, there at Berkeley and the Sunset Strip, then later seeking meaning in middle-class, tenured lives of scaled-down dreams that grow large again once the 2016 election cycle looms and the good old days look better and better. Though the book is a touch too long, it holds its energy without flagging, and every note sounds true.
If James Michener were hipper on music—and everyone from Dylan to Country Joe to Jerry and Janis shows up in Shiner’s pages—he might have written this instead of The Drifters. Reality-tinged nostalgia for those who were there—or wish they were.Pub Date: May 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59606-900-8
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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