Stately, low-key fiction from the well-known management guru: loosely connected vignettes (Drucker compares them to the movements of a quartet) from the lives of four distinguished Europeans who reach their later years around the turn-of-the-century. First there's Prince Sobieski, Austria's ambassador to England in 1906, who has just received a letter in which natural daughter Henrietta (the only person he really loves) begs the Prince to aid her husband's military career. The Prince can't disappoint her—but he can't behave unethically either. So before he comes to a compromise solution, he must review his life: mistresses; young cousin/wife Margit, who never minded the Prince's philandering (she even set him up with her dearest friend); the acquisition of great paintings; the building of a financial empire (thanks partly to training from the family estate's Jewish manager); and his avuncular concern over Margit's latest affair. Then the focus shifts to British mega-banker McGregor Hinton, who also faces an ethical crisis and reviews his life: his poor beginnings; his Drucker-esque education in math/philosophy; his noble secret marriage to a mulatto prostitute after she bore his deformed child (she's now dying of cancer); his brushes with aristocracy, J. P. Morgan, and Sandor Ferenczi (they discuss the Oedipus Complex); his London/Vienna banking coup and "entrepreneurial" vision; and, now, his decision to resign and tackle the 18th-century mathematicians. Next: Austrian Jewish banker Julius von Mosenthal, who's planning a major restructuring of the Bank of London & Austria; while brooding on the upcoming meeting with partners Hinton and Sobieski, he recalls his long-ago cockney mistress Shells, planning a reunion. (The resignation plans of Hinton and Sobieski will coincide perfectly with Julius' patriotic scheme.) And, finally, to balance all that finance with some culture, there's the life of Baroness Rafaela Wald-Reifnitz—descended from the purest Sephardic Jews, painted by two great artists, devoted to music, in love (despite rough times along the way) with problematic husband Arthur. Drueker doesn't really succeed in building a satisfactory chamber-piece from these separate, somewhat repetitious life-studies; the final section, in fact, doesn't work at all as a coda. And the interior-monologue style here becomes awfully dry and stilted, with page after page of "he mused" and "he thought" and "he continued to himself." Still: these are elegant people elegantly pondering diplomacy, etiquette, finance, adultery, anti-Semitism, history, old age, and the approaching Great War—and readers partial to a sedate, old-world sensibility will be richly rewarded.
Pub Date: June 1, 1982
ISBN: 0060149744
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
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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