Wavemaker II

Rating:
Summary: A Tidal Wave in a Tea Pot.
Review: In just 200 terse pages, Mary-Beth Hughes knocks this novel absolutely out of the park. I've rarely seen any writer, no matter how gifted, pack this much talent, pathos, and intrigue into so few pages. The setting is summer, New York City, 1964. Family man Will Clemens takes one for the team, refusing to rat out fast-talking lawyer Roy Cohn, and is rewarded with a prison term. Will leaves behind a frantically disordered and struggling suburban home--it's all his wife Kay can do to watch over their son Bo, who is deathly ill with a relatively (at this time) unknown disease. Daughter Lou-Lou is left in the lurch, shunted too and fro between neighbors and friends as her parents attention is obviously focused elsewhere. Hughes alternates back and forth between each family member's perspective with a dizzying flair and ease, preparing the reader for an ending that turns out to be nothing like what you expected. Great Stuff!

Rating:
Summary: A Tidal Wave in a Tea Pot.
Review: In just 200 terse pages, Mary-Beth Hughes knocks this novel absolutely out of the park. I've rarely seen any writer, no matter how gifted, pack this much talent, pathos, and intrigue into so few pages. The setting is summer, New York City, 1964. Family man Will Clemens takes one for the team, refusing to rat out fast-talking lawyer Roy Cohn, and is rewarded with a prison term. Will leaves behind a frantically disordered and struggling suburban home--it's all his wife Kay can do to watch over their son Bo, who is deathly ill with a relatively (at this time) unknown disease. Daughter Lou-Lou is left in the lurch, shunted too and fro between neighbors and friends as her parents attention is obviously focused elsewhere. Hughes alternates back and forth between each family member's perspective with a dizzying flair and ease, preparing the reader for an ending that turns out to be nothing like what you expected. Great Stuff!

Rating:
Summary: Roy Cohn--From a Completely Different Angle
Review: Wavemaker II is an interesting little novel, if a bit odd in its take. The novel concerns what happens to a New Jersey family when the husband-father figure is imprisoned for refusing to testify against Roy Cohn in the early sixties. We see bits and pieces of Cohn, and he ultimately comes to the family's rescue, but this novel is certainly not what you would expect. It is not about Roy Cohn or any of his activities. It is about an American family and how they survive the near fatal illness of one of their children coupled with the imprisonment of the father. That's what is sort of odd about it. It's take is refreshingly unexpected and the writing is very strong. Overall, an interesting and different read.

Rating:
Summary: Roy Cohn--From a Completely Different Angle
Review: Wavemaker II is an interesting little novel, if a bit odd in its take. The novel concerns what happens to a New Jersey family when the husband-father figure is imprisoned for refusing to testify against Roy Cohn in the early sixties. We see bits and pieces of Cohn, and he ultimately comes to the family's rescue, but this novel is certainly not what you would expect. It is not about Roy Cohn or any of his activities. It is about an American family and how they survive the near fatal illness of one of their children coupled with the imprisonment of the father. That's what is sort of odd about it. It's take is refreshingly unexpected and the writing is very strong. Overall, an interesting and different read.

Rating:
Summary: Touching, sincere, and gripping!
Review: Well, I have hardly as much to say as the previous reviewer... but anyway. I thought this book was wonderfully well written! The fictional dream was kept deftly alive (for me) from cover-to-cover, and I had no trouble whatsoever following the story, the characters, the chronology, etc. In fact, the book was such a good read I've suggested it to nearly all the readers I know. The author has a marvelous knack for pulling you in.

The only dissapointing thing for me, after reading Wavemaker II, was entering Ms. Hughes' name into the Amazon search-engine and discovering this was her only book!

Anyway. While I suppose one does run the risk, when borrowing from non-fiction, of mixing up dates and/or places... it might benefit the lay-person to know that this book is fiction. I don't recall ever anywhere in it's pages the allusion that all or any of this ever really happened. And as a work of fiction, I think it shines. It's the best book I've read yet this year, and would suggest it for those who like their fiction dark and strong (there's no cream & sugar here... just the exquisite aroma of a strong new talent!).

Rating:
Summary: Touching, sincere, and gripping!
Review: Well, I have hardly as much to say as the previous reviewer... but anyway. I thought this book was wonderfully well written! The fictional dream was kept deftly alive (for me) from cover-to-cover, and I had no trouble whatsoever following the story, the characters, the chronology, etc. In fact, the book was such a good read I've suggested it to nearly all the readers I know. The author has a marvelous knack for pulling you in.

The only dissapointing thing for me, after reading Wavemaker II, was entering Ms. Hughes' name into the Amazon search-engine and discovering this was her only book!

Anyway. While I suppose one does run the risk, when borrowing from non-fiction, of mixing up dates and/or places... it might benefit the lay-person to know that this book is fiction. I don't recall ever anywhere in it's pages the allusion that all or any of this ever really happened. And as a work of fiction, I think it shines. It's the best book I've read yet this year, and would suggest it for those who like their fiction dark and strong (there's no cream & sugar here... just the exquisite aroma of a strong new talent!).

Rating:
Summary: A nonsensical book by a promising writer
Review: What can you say about a book that makes you turn the pages till the end, at which point you realize nothing has happened? Mary-Beth Bughes has captured the voice of Roy Cohn admirably, but not one hint is given of his context! To read only this book, your impression of Cohn would only be that he was a very rich, funny man, with a girlfriend named Esther, who helped out the family of a man who didn't rat on him in a criminal case. Nowhere do we see the words "Un-American Activities" "McCarthyism" or anything else to connect him to the real Roy Cohn...

The majority of the story turns on the family of the fictitious man, Will, who kept mum on the stand for Cohn (no mention of what this case was about! the narrative proceeds as if in a vague daydream): Father Will is in jail while his son is in New York Hospital for a successful Bone Marrow Transplant. Of course, such operations didn't exist then, but that doesn't stop this book! There are at least three supposedly significant allusions to seeing Man of La Mancha, which wasn't even written yet, and to an arrival at Penn Station, when it would have been a pile of rubble, and even to the heliport on the East River, which didn't open till the 1970s! (There is not a single detail about 1964 which rings true, which makes you wonder whether Rick Moody, Sven Birkerts, Lorrie Moore, and the other blurbmeisters on the book jacket even read the thing. One blurb even mentions important civil liberties questions in the wake of 9/11--and there is absolutely not one word in Wavemaker II which addresses anything of the sort!)

Just the same, buried within this book is a lovely story of the coming of age of Will's daughter Lou-Lou, some beautiful writing that darts in an out of the heads of characters, and a sleepwalking exposition style that could be very effective in a story in which the author seemed to have even the vaguest idea what she's talking about! But while this author shows important promise and knows how to tell a story in a surprisingly captivating way, and can even make the notorious Roy Cohn appear as a convincingly vivid cartoon character of a cameo, the plot of this novel, set so specifically in Roy Cohn's 1964, simply makes no sense whatsoever.