![]() ![]() Mikki is a settled-in-her-routines divorced mother of two, happily a mom, gift-shop owner, and co-parent with her ex-husband, Perry. Three woman who join together to rent a large space along the beach in Los Angeles for their stores-a gift shop, a bakery, and a bookstore-become fast friends as they each experience the highs, and lows, of love.īree is a friendly but standoffish bookstore owner who keeps everyone she knows at arm’s length, from guys she meets in bars to her friends. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Watch him try.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Nobody told this master of dark comedy there are things you can’t make jokes about. As much as forgiveness seems the explicit theme of the book, its evil twin, revenge, burbles menacingly beneath the surface, and the ending is a shocker. Adulterers, egotists, bullies-well, we all make mistakes. Once again, characters you shouldn’t like at all become strangely sympathetic in Perrotta’s hands. But in the meantime, she has to deal with this stupid Hall of Fame project, which pushes many of her buttons. Her once-unshakeable belief in her own agency has been almost fatally challenged since then, shoving her off her track to the presidency of the United States (not “a crazy ambition,” according to her), now offering as booby prize the possibility of taking over for the principal when he retires at the end of the year. The connection between the #MeToo headlines and her own past (she’s always thought of what happened with her sophomore English teacher as an “affair”) is perturbing. As the story begins, Tracy is at the breakfast table with her 10-year-old daughter, reading the paper. ![]() ![]() Combining narrated chapters with short first-person “testimonies” by five of the characters, the plot unfolds with the you-are-there feel of a documentary, or mockumentary perhaps, though the generally arch tone is belied by a not-so-funny ending. Flick, assistant principal in another New Jersey town. ![]() Tracy Flick, portrayed so unforgettably by Reese Witherspoon in the movie, is not only back, she’s still in high school-now as Dr. Fletcher (2017), revives the now-iconic protagonist of his third, Election (1998). Perrotta's 10th novel, following the delightful Mrs. The campaign to create a Hall of Fame at a suburban New Jersey high school lures a few skeletons out of their closets. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |