The faint but persistent acrid undertone of Miller's best-seller of last season, The Good Mother (its popular focus, a child-abuse custody case), dominates these 11 short stories in which an unhappy mix of divorced or partner-hopping lovers and parents—both young and middle-aged, all middle class—fumble at self-determination, with random grabs at status or security or, simply, drama in a drifting life. Miller's people—most of them vaguely bothered most of the time—when it comes to a grip on the Good Life, are all thumbs. In the title story, a young man becomes obsessed with the daughters of the richest man in his tiny midwestern town, since, fatherless early, and with a distracted mother, he needed a status-y "sense of place." Yet like the mother in "The Abbotts," who will watch her son lope foolishly after bogus American status, the young grandmother in "Leaving Home," living within the miserable marriage of her son, knows that she has "no power to stave off ruin. . .to guard her son against his share of pain." Meanwhile, women court depression; in "Slides," yesterday's nude photos, which stirred an ex-husband, only underscore time past with an aging lover; and in "Travel," a woman traveling in a small South American country, with a deal-making, exploitative lover, capitulates lo American privilege and self-loathing. And men strut in foolish sexual rituals: one is a telephone freak who, at the close, is repeatedly ringing a recorded message; and a "man who loved women" sleeps with two, feeling, since he was passionately involved, that he was "faithful to both." The story of a young mother who wanders from the boring bed of her eighth lover to assemble her son's toy train ("Expensive Gifts") contains the central image, as the disconnected cars (like disconnected families) have a way of magnetically repelling one another when clumsily manipulated. An adventurous, chilly collection of stories, some with a John Cheever-ish bite, about uncoupled lives rattling on into isolation.
Pub Date: May 1, 1987
ISBN: 0060157550
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1987
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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