Island - Hardcover

A strange, concertedly poetic first novel about five disparate souls vacationing on an island off the eastern seaboard as a hurricane approaches. The people are: Donald Bartlett, an English professor and widower who's just remarried, producing bliss for him but bile for his teenage daughter. She's Meredith, confined to a wheelchair due to a birth defect, lonely and deeply jealous of her dad. The second Mrs. Bartlett is a waitress named Carole with a butterfly tattoo on her neck and a mystical bent; she falls for the socially inept Donald because he writes her a pretty poem, and because she wants to have a child. Their vacation companions are old friends of Donald's--Roscoe, a magician and juggler, and his bitter mate, Belinda, a nursing-home beautician who practices her wiles on old folks too senile to complain about the off-the-wall do's she gives them. Together, these five turn their rented beach house into the scene of a latter-day Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with Donald inadvertently revealing himself to be a big poetic fake, Belinda growing even more bitter because she comes to realize that, contrary to her fantasies, Donald never cared for her at all, and Carole announcing she's pregnant and running for the last ferry back to the mainland before the hurricane arrives. With her out of the way, Meredith once again has her dad's full attention--and the vacationers are left to weather the storm as best they can. Some delicate aper‡us arise, but in the end this is so hermetic that it leaves one more boggled than intrigued. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Despite stylistic defects, Schweighardt handles complex emotional issues with some skill in her provocative debut novel about two couples and a crippled adolescent vacationing on an unnamed island as a severe hurricane approaches. College professor Donald Bartlett is a poet who has lost his inspiration and hopes that his young second wife will precipitate the muse's return. The family, including Donald's teenage daughter Meredith, who was born with no feet, is joined by Donald's old friends Roscoe, whose juggling and sword-swallowing routines attract nightly crowds back in Key West, and Belinda, a beautician who works her magic at a nursing home. Everything here is fraught with significance: the storm mirrors the inner turbulence of the players; Meredith's physical imperfections reflect the adults' spiritual deformities; and the setting evokes Prospero and Miranda, as do the characters' concerns with art and artifice. Schweighardt's brief but heavily symbolic work is best read as a modern fable which asks how people variously evade or embrace disaster.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.