Answers to Lucky - Hardcover

Owen, Howard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060173122 ISBN 13: 9780060173128

Publisher: Harpercollins, 1996

Synopsis

Driven by their father to become successful, brothers Tom Ed and Jack are torn apart when Jack contracts polio and is cruelly dismissed as useless by the family, and years later he vows to reestablish himself. $20,000 ad/promo.

About this title

About the Author

Howard Owen is deputy managing editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Reviews

Loud, hard-drinking truck driver Thomas Wayne Sweatt wants his twin sons, born in 1946, to be the strongest and smartest in North Carolina, so he and his wife name one boy Jack Dempsey ("Lucky") Sweatt, and the other Thomas Edison Sweatt. When Lucky contracts polio at age eight, his father begins to consider the boy a source of bad luck and thereafter favors budding athlete Tom Ed, who goes on to play minor league basketball in the 1960s. High-school dropout Lucky, meanwhile, lives in a trailer, works in a factory and is estranged from his family. This third novel from Owen, author of the praised Littlejohn, is a quietly powerful narrative, a poignant study of sibling rivalry and family dysfunction. By 1992, Lucky is running a bed-and-breakfast in Virginia with his wife, but he suddenly shows up to help Tom Ed, now an unscrupulous Republican politician, in his bid for the governorship of North Carolina. A number of subplots swirl around the campaign- Tom Ed courts the religious right and a pro-life group (while paying for a lover's abortion); he is secretly involved in a real estate swindle; a doctor is charged with murder after he accidentally runs over a fundamentalist minister-but these strands are either undeveloped or tend to the melodramatic. The real interest, as the title suggests, lies in Lucky; politically liberal, the adoptive father of two Vietnamese children and one black boy, he is an outsider in more than one sense. Lucky's search for emotional closure as he confronts his good ol' boy brother and their distant father gains emotional resonance in Owen's sure evocation of Southern life.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In a rich regional diction, and with flights of satiric darts aimed at hometown politicking, a completely engaging story about the family ties that bind--tight--and the ego-pricking legacy of growing up poor. Owen (Littlejohn, 1992; Fat Lightning, 1994) tells of middle- aged North Carolina twins--one running for governor--who are trying to work out the persistent influence of a father's obsession. Tommy Sweatt grew up in river-rat country, hardscrabble mean, then married well-off Genie, who stood by him even when, after the birth of twin boys (christened Jack Dempsey and Tom Edison Sweatt), her mother tried to buy her son-in-law into a divorce. It was then that Tommy made a vow: He would raise Jack and Tom Ed to be the best, ``to make everyone wish they were Sweatts.'' So he drilled the two hard, and they--close, united, hounded by their father--excelled. But at eight, Jack, nicknamed ``Lucky,'' contracted polio, and Tommy withdrew his love to concentrate on Tom Ed. Lucky then became just another debility that Tom Ed had to overcome--like being poor or hitting a curve. The isolated Lucky achieved and then floundered, erupted in hatred of Tom Ed and the town--until his happy marriage, family and new life in Virginia. Now, though, he is summoned by Tommy to drive Tom Ed in his campaign: to towns, ``pig pickin's,'' tobacco farms, colleges. The public likes Tom Ed--and, an artist at political oratory, he keeps his private self hidden: except in an unwise love affair, or in tipping his hand to Lucky. The men touch their old intimacy, and in a close race it looks like Tom Ed is edging ahead. But no one can foresee the tragicomic end to a lifelong dream. With poignancy, loamy humor, and home truths about the kind of politics where ``People don't want Integrity and Commitment. People want the room to light up.'' ($20,000 ad/promo; regional author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Structured as flashbacks amidst a political campaign, this tale depicts sibling rivalry. The Sweatt brothers, Tom Ed and "Lucky," are boomer-age twins, the former a rising pol in North Carolina, the latter a slacker who runs a B & B. Tom Ed calls in a chit Lucky owes him, and so the duo tool around the hustings of the Tar Heel State. Flashback after flashback reveals the brothers' strained relationship and their hard-driving father's efforts to make them men. The present revolves around those who intrigue to doom Tom Ed's career. Given his hypocritical stance on abortion (a pro-lifer who gets his paramour an abortion), that's neither hard to do, nor central to the main plot. Rather, Lucky, so nicknamed after escaping from death as a child, occasionally remembers the rotten events of his life and Tom Ed's rotten character, toward which he feels less animus after Tom Ed's fall, paving the way for brotherly love. None too complicated, this single-theme novel might appeal to men who will identify with the characters and Tidewater places. Gilbert Taylor

Edition details

• Publisher: Harpercollins
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060173122
• ISBN 13: 9780060173128
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224