Loving Donovan

Publishers Weekly

This bittersweet fourth novel by McFadden (Sugar) traces the lives of two damaged but resolute people destined for an ill-fated love affair. The reader meets protagonist Campbell as a sensitive eight-year-old living in a Brooklyn housing project. As she watches her mother weep and rant at her feckless, philandering father, Campbell promises herself that "ain't no man ever going to break my heart." At age 15, however, that promise is broken when she gets pregnant by a high school boyfriend who skips town. Donovan, meanwhile, also grows up listening to his parents' violent quarrels. When he's nine years old, he is assaulted by a pedophile in his building, an experience that impairs his future relationships with women. As an adult, he takes a city transit job and becomes a workaholic. The two meet when Campbell is a single mother in her 30s and a talented fledgling artist. She bumps into Donovan at an art show and promptly falls in love. But Donovan is threatened by Campbell's money and success. He brutally rejects her, leaving her to play out the scenes of bitter anguish she observed so often while growing up. McFadden's latest is heartfelt and competently written, with her usual flair for dialogue and well-paced narrative. Yet Campbell and Donovan respond predictably to their traumas, and Campbell is not as vivid as some of McFadden's earlier heroines. In spite of her worldly success, Campbell is an archetypal female victim, too thinly drawn to carry the melodramatic scenes of despair that cap the book. (Jan.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A slice of life and lots of sex, in a fourth from McFadden (This Bitter Earth, 2002, etc.).

Campbell writes in her journal, "Ain't no man ever going to make me cry." Her mother, Millie, does little but clean house obsessively and mutter about her husband Fred's cheating. Luscious, a 400-pound neighbor woman, who's got nothing better to do than warm the vandalized benches around the Brookline housing projects, says it's a crying shame, but Millie married Fred just because she was afraid of becoming a spinster, cuddling cats in her lap 'stead of babies. Campbell doesn't know what to do but watch her mother weep and keep on bringing those little yellow pills (Valium) she takes every day. A move to a Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstone that the family buys holds an unpleasant surprise: a creepy tenant. This peppermint-sucking public masturbator is Clyde Walker, and just the way he looks at her makes Campbell nervous. But he promptly moves on, to everyone's relief, replaced by flamboyantly gay Clarence Simon and his lover Awed Johnson: an abusive bisexual who cheats right and left on swishy, pathetic Clarence, whom Campbell likes-one more reason for her not to trust nobody. An abrupt segue leads to Luscious's childhood memories of rape and abuse by a fat pimp, and, moving right along, there's also Solomon, son of Grammy, a witchy old lady. Sickly and spoiled, Solomon grows up to father Donovan, Campbell's eventual love interest. Sensually loving romps start turning into a relationship-but, hey, looks like Donovan has a commitment problem, when he ditches her at the airport before their flight to the Caribbean. Not even his ever-loving Grammy, who still cleans his apartment, knows the truth: Thatas a boy Donovan was repeatedly molested by Grammy's boarder, Clyde Walker, the peppermint sucker. Campbell writes poems about her broken heart.

Sordid and incoherent, from a talented writer who's done much better. (Warning: fairly graphic descriptions of adult-child sex.)