Synopsis
Donald Cooper returns home after twenty years to purge the adolescent memories from which he left town to escape, in a compelling story that summons up the intimate and innocent family life of the 1950s. 25,000 first printing. National ad/promo.
Reviews
In this quip-packed novel from the author of Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? , narrator Donald Cooper, a divorced father and gag writer in L.A., reassesses his life and finally comes of age. Donald is gloomy: the results of his lung biopsy are pending, his girlfriend has just stormed out of the apartment, it's his 45th birthday and no well-wishers have called--not even his elderly mother back in Chicago. Donald himself has avoided his hometown since his younger brother's death 25 years ago. But when he learns that his mother has been hospitalized after a fall, he rushes to her bedside. She persuades him to retrieve some items from the house where he grew up, and returning there allows him to begin a protracted eulogy to Danny, who died at 18. In no particular order, he recalls baseball games, family dinners, holidays and dating, telling how Danny, his closest friend, shrugged off competition though he was a natural at sports and easily won girls over with his mature sensitivity. Powers based this novel on a one-man show, Scissors, Paper, Rock , in which he toured the country in 1989; reading it is like watching a series of home movies.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Powers's fourth novel (Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?, 1975, is his best known) is a 1950's coming-of-age saga about a boy who loses his brother in an accident. Its bittersweet nostalgia is amiably comic most of the way through. Donald Cooper returns to the neighborhood where he grew up--on the South Side of Chicago--when his mother, a widow, breaks her hip. The narrative then seesaws between the present and the past that comes to haunt Donald. His mother was a housewife and his father drove a delivery truck at a time when the nuclear family was celebrated not for its dysfunctions but for its wholesome American flavor. And Donald, who in the present is recovering from lung- cancer surgery, remembers it mostly that way: brother Danny playing the trumpet, lemonade on the front porch, trips to the corner store, the crosstown rivalry between the White Sox and the Cubs. The story jump-cuts between years and instances, between Donald and Danny, between the usual crises and illnesses of childhood, providing nostalgia by way of 16-inch softball (``Many a Chicagoan has spent virtually every warm evening hour of his life playing sixteen-inch softball'') and high jinks by way of puberty (``About every ten minutes I'd have this urge to gangbang Europe'') and a mother who ``goes through the motions of tucking us in,'' no matter how old the boys became. Finally, however, after a series of instances involving the family car, Danny borrows it one night and is killed in a car wreck, whereupon the story turns suitably melancholy before finishing with an aching description of autumn and a relatively upbeat ending. Portions of the novel were originally presented in a one-man show. While the prose style is not particularly distinguished, the material has enough psychic weight and nuclear-family ambiance to deserve attention. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Do not be misled by the awkwardly hyphenated title. Powers, author of The Last Catholic in America ( LJ 2/15/73) and Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? ( LJ 12/1/75), offers a well-crafted tale of humor and redemption. The story follows comedy writer Donald Cooper as he returns to his family home and confronts the grief he has carried for 20 years. Cooper's memories of growing up in a Chicago neighborhood, Saturday baseball, evenings on the porch, and unfinished lives are counterpoised with the complexities of his present relationships. Told as a series of flashbacks interspersed with ironic commentary, the result is a funny and poignant tale of the human journey and family bonds. An excellent addition to all fiction collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/91.
- Jan Blodgett, St. Mary's Cty. Records Ctr. & Archives, Leonardtown, Md.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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