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Overview
Pete Flowers is facing forty. A shrewdly successful entrepreneur, a long-distance runner who can still turn heads, Pete leads a comfortable, private life. His last relationship, with a witty and impetuous man, ended a couple of years ago, but they continue to see each other as friends - linked by a strong sense of family. Pete's fear of intimacy, combined with the long shadow of AIDS, has kept him cautious, frustrated, and alone. When Pete's mother, the lively and strong-willed matriarch of a well-to-do Philadelphia clan, is diagnosed with cancer, her illness becomes the catalyst for Pete and his siblings to face their own demons. Bea and Mary Alice - two sisters as different as beer and champagne - struggle to understand how a woman as sophisticated and unrelenting as their mother would neglect her own health. Stu, Pete's successful stockbroker brother with an insensitive wife and a secret that could put him behind bars, chooses withdrawal. Phil - successful businessman, aloof father, and loving husband - is neither certain of his own future nor confident in his role in this adult family. And Pete, desperate to transcend his isolation but afraid to take the risk, becomes the focus of his mother's mission to close the gaps in the family, while there's still time.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
By the time readers realize that virtually nothing happens in Oliver's memorable first novel, they will be much too caught up with his singular characters--and dexterous prose--to mind. This witty, thoughtful story opens with the four Flowers offspring being summoned to dinner at their parents' Main Line Philadelphia home. (``Something is up,'' muses son Pete, a gay man facing 40--and the ever-present threat of AIDS--with no little trepidation.) Indeed, matriarch Liz--a scintillating combination of Auntie Mame and General Schwarzkopf--is about to undergo a mastectomy. Pete is prompted to reexamine his life and his values; the other siblings' many and varied domestic difficulties also enliven Oliver's engrossing, highly literate narrative. The scene in which Liz--languishing after surgery with a ``medicinal Scotch''--questions Pete about his amatory affairs is a triumph: Oliver elicits laughter and a lump in the throat with equal finesse. Reflective vignettes are self-contained gems, and concise character delineations speak volumes: brother Stu, for example, is ``rarely seen out of his. . . heavy business brogues (the same model in four colors).'' Oliver's commingling of humor and drama makes for a sterling debut. BOMC alternate; QPB selection. (Sept.)Ray Olson
Homing in on 40, Pete Flowers is stalled. He broke off his last relationship out of AIDS panic and hasn't had sex since. He's a brilliant florist, unable to take on all the work Philadelphia's wealthy beg him to do, but frankly, it's getting old. And now his mother, Liz, fesses up she's let a breast cancer metastasize to her brain and she's seeing things. Yet all is hardly lost: Pete's ex, Bill, who's wealthy "and" drop-dead handsome (but then, Pete's the other bookend of the set), has carried the torch ever since the split-up and finally has a plan and the courage to try it. Pete's dad has a plan, too: covertly buy Pete's business and get him to take over the family gold mine, a frozen meat-pie factory. And, despite the cancer and the hallucinations, Liz's perseverance and humor put Kate Hepburn to shame. So, of course, things come out all right--pretty much, believably much, anyway. This first novel by a TV dramatist, who fills it with vital, natural dialogue, absorbing interior monologues, and a narrative continuity that proceeds in visualizable scenes, is marvelously amusing, affecting, and endearing.Book Details
Published
August 26, 1992
Publisher
New York : G.P. Putnam's, c1992.
Pages
304
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780399137679