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Library | Audience | Home Location | Material Type | Shelf Number | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Walter | Adult | Large print | Large print book | AMICK | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
From the author of the widely praised novel The Lake, the River & the Other Lake comes this love story of a man and a woman who choose an unconventional way to redefine themselves during and after World War II.
Reviews (1)
New York Review of Books Review
A veteran takes girlie pictures in this novel of World War II. IN typical pinup photos from the 1940s, the seduction rests in what is left to the imagination: a lacy glimpse of a garter here, a slyly turned shoulder blade there. Steve Amick's sweet novel "Nothing but a Smile" understands this dictum well - maybe too well. For a book set behind the scenes of those pinups, its posture of deliberate innocence feels not just coy but remarkably chaste. In a world at war, it suggests, there is nothing lascivious about stripping down for the camera if it means providing some small comfort to the boys overseas. Amick's conceit is straightforward, if a little implausible. In the waning days of World War II, Wink Dutton, a commercial artist whose drawing hand was injured in a submarine accident, returns to Chicago to find a changed home front, short on jobs and apartments for veterans. In a temporary arrangement, Wink moves in above the camera shop owned by his war buddy, whose wife, Sal, has been paying the bills by secretly selling girlie photos - of herself. Wink gets in on the operation, whereupon financial success, artistic recognition and romance follow in short order (as the title suggests, Amick isn't one for pessimism). But given the postwar sexual charge that drives this novel, it's frustrating that it never sheds its golly-gee period-piece veneer. As in his first novel, "The Lake, the River and the Other Lake," Amick's greatest strength is his generosity toward his characters. He takes a playful, ribbing tone as he rotates between Sal's and Wink's third-person perspectives, and he seems to share their naïve wonder at each stage of their predictable game. When Wink, confounded, realizes Sal's inlaws may have discovered their source of income, he concludes that the possibility is "too coincidental and far too disturbing to imagine" - never mind that her brunette wig is about as much a disguise as Clark Kent's glasses and spit-curl. Amick's affection for his characters is real, but the flip side is that he has difficulty allowing any behavior that could be construed as morally dubious. (The girlie photos, naturally, do not count.) Sal's husband dies in a convenient accident before anything illicit has transpired between her and Wink, while Reenie - Sal's best friend and romantic rival - is paired off before she can disapprove of their marriage. The result is a novel with all the happy gloss of a romantic comedy, complete with 1940s slang: breasts are "bazooms," stomachs are "breadbaskets," masturbation is "waxing the dolphin." But Amick's attempt at authenticity actually undercuts his efforts, with his characters' affects standing in for real depth. The slang wears thin, as Amick fails to distinguish between outer appearances and inner lives, as if people in the 1940s were no more complicated than the manners they put on. Too often, Amick mistakes this sort of maudlin sentimentality for real emotion. There is simply nothing to match the subtle sensuality that the pinups would seem to promise. Rather, the novel is sweet in the way one might say a man is sweet after an uncertain first date, arching the "e" and leaving a question mark hanging. Amelia Atlas has written for The New York Sun and The New York Observer. She lives in Berlin.
