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Rating: 
Summary: Higgins fans only?
Review: Do you feel strongly about the S&L crisis in the early 90s? Then maybe this book is for you. The main character runs his own little bank, but the powers that be just don't want him to succeed. His bank is technically in the red, so the government wants to shut him down! On page after page, our hero ponders his situation. Parts of this book doesn't really read like a novel, more like a really long reader's letter in some provincial newspaper. Other parts have a slight elegic feel to them, but it just doesn't work when the characters are all cardboard.
Rating:
Summary: ZZZZZZ
Review: Swan Boats at Four is perhaps the greatest tour-de-force of unreliable narration I've ever seen, and now that Higgins is no longer with us, most of us won't live to see it surpassed: none of its four central chracters are to be believed, but boy do they talk, at length and rewardingly, in the best and most entertaining Higginsese. Sailing on a costly transAtlantic liner are an adulterous banker and his care-worn wife, the banker's former mistress, who happens now to be a ship's officer, and best of all, a dapper, elderly gent who may be a former lawyer, and is certainly the glibbest talker Higgins ever crafted in his decades of crafting glib fictional talkers. We early find out that the banker couple are traveling to avoid facing his home-front problems with bank auditors--he keeps telling everyone, with decreasing credibility, the problems are not his fault, she--similarly-- that things are bound to turn out fine. We know that the mistress (she rapidly renews her relationship with the banker) and the old gent are in cahoots. Beyond this, most of the story is in the old gent's words, which we intermittently understand may all be fiction within the fiction-- the town he affectionately describes as his own; the law practice he inherited and left behind; the woman he loved whose demise has just left him a widower; even the fashionable downtown Boston club he claims to have saved from extinction with his sage leadership--may all be pure fabrication. The mystery of the tale is as to why he attaches himself to this particular couple and bedazzles them. And the overwhelming answer is one zinger of an ending that left me short of breath.
Rating: 
Summary: Elegy for the Good Life
Review: Swan Boats at Four is perhaps the greatest tour-de-force of unreliable narration I've ever seen, and now that Higgins is no longer with us, most of us won't live to see it surpassed: none of its four central chracters are to be believed, but boy do they talk, at length and rewardingly, in the best and most entertaining Higginsese. Sailing on a costly transAtlantic liner are an adulterous banker and his care-worn wife, the banker's former mistress, who happens now to be a ship's officer, and best of all, a dapper, elderly gent who may be a former lawyer, and is certainly the glibbest talker Higgins ever crafted in his decades of crafting glib fictional talkers. We early find out that the banker couple are traveling to avoid facing his home-front problems with bank auditors--he keeps telling everyone, with decreasing credibility, the problems are not his fault, she--similarly-- that things are bound to turn out fine. We know that the mistress (she rapidly renews her relationship with the banker) and the old gent are in cahoots. Beyond this, most of the story is in the old gent's words, which we intermittently understand may all be fiction within the fiction-- the town he affectionately describes as his own; the law practice he inherited and left behind; the woman he loved whose demise has just left him a widower; even the fashionable downtown Boston club he claims to have saved from extinction with his sage leadership--may all be pure fabrication. The mystery of the tale is as to why he attaches himself to this particular couple and bedazzles them. And the overwhelming answer is one zinger of an ending that left me short of breath.
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