Customer Reviews

Nothing but a Smile: A Novel

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

On the surface, the plot of "Nothing but a Smile" may sound seamy. It's a tale about a Chicago-bred wife, Sal (short for Sally), who poses in "girlie" photos as she waits for her husband, Chesty, to return from the war. Said photos are taken by Chesty's good friend Wink, a war buddy who was honorably discharged and received a Purple Heart for the noble act of getting his fingers chopped off while in a drunkenly hung over state on a ship in the Pacific. Add into the equation Sal's friend Reenie, who also poses in the forbidden pictures, and things appear even seedier.

The thing is, though, "Nothing but a Smile" is actually more charming than sleazy, a comfortable time-warp read that isn't exactly a page-turner but definitely has its moments. Bad things happen to these people along the way, but essentially, it's an endearing Midwestern story about budding, photogenic friends in their mid-20s who are creatively trying to find their way in life. What starts as a spontaneous idea by Sal to make a little money on the side turns into a brief amateur enterprise that's moderately successful and, ultimately, leads to future plans in which everyone involved manages to build a new and satisfying life.

Vivid descriptions about the old-time art of photography -- when prints were placed in chemicals in darkrooms and slaved over to make just right -- also make this an interesting read, especially in an age when the average cell phone can store numerous random photos at the simple click of a button. It wasn't always so easy.

Though Steve Amick's sometimes pedestrian and clunky prose, short chapters and constantly changing character viewpoints aren't the stuff of legendary authorship, he does manage to aptly capture American life in the 1940s. Popular catch phrases of the time, the substandard treatment of women, a housing shortage after World War II and a paranoid Herbert Hoover-run government all infiltrate the book with surprising effectiveness. The ending is a bit of a slog to wade through, but overall, "Nothing but a Smile" is a pretty good read that covers a risque subject in a refreshingly old-fashioned way.

This book is just fabulous. It's smart, funny, sexy, and heartbreaking all wrapped up and splashed across roughly a hundred short chapters. It's a love story in a historical setting without being schmulzy. The characters are iconic of the time without losing their honesty, the prose and POV choices are clever, and the historical elements are great to watch play out. Amick has a great sense of relationships, how two people who know everything about each other can still be vulnerable to misreading the signs, and can write easily from the perspective of both a man and a woman. "Nothing But a Smile" is a great read!

I seldom buy new hardcover books, but after reading a review of "Nothing But a Smile" in People magazine, I was hooked. The book is written in the easy old style of a classic movie from the 1940s. I could easily see movie stars from that era playing the roles in the book. It's an old fashioned romance, and very well done.

Amick is able to write from both the male and female perspectives easily and mostly believably. It's a little corny in spots, a little modern in others. It's a love story, but it's also a nice piece of historical fiction. You really do get absorbed into the lives of the characters and the emotions they must have felt living through the time they did.

I don't know how much of Sal and Wink's story was based on real people, or if they came completely from Steve Amick's imagination. However, the poses, the photos, the card backs and other scenes were very clever, and you really do have to appreciate the creativity, regardless of the inspiration. For such risque content, the book is actually very wholesome.

I almost gave this book four stars. The end seemed to wrap up at a much faster pace than the rest of the book. By the time you get to the last fifty pages, you're so involved with the characters you want to know the last details as much as you knew all the previous details of their lives. I feel Amick could have elaborated more, particularly in the epilogue. However, I feel that way about most great books I read, so I guess that means this was another great book. I left my rating at five stars if only because a book was finally written on this subject and it turned out almost exactly as I hoped it would be.

I love this book. Steve Amick manages to strike a balance between nostalgia and honesty which is difficulty in this day and age -- and refreshing.

Well, first of all, I love the cover art of this book, but I also took the time to read the novel and adored it. Post-WWII Chicago comes vividly to life in Amick's beautiful prose. His attention to historic detail (watch for a cameo by a young man named "Hef") brings into sharp focus an era in which my own grandparents struggled their way into adulthood. Despite its historic setting, however, this is an uplifting tale about people who choose not only to survive, but also thrive, in one of the world's most difficult eras. Who among us today couldn't use a story like that in their lives?

I must confess, I am somewhat mystified by the positive reviews this book has received.
I have never read a more amateurish, desultory book in my life; it's as if this were written by a talented high school student- one with but a passing familiarity with the subject matter at hand. The author appears facile at best; any research into the era or industries involved seems to have been half-hearted- and the end results are far from convincing.

There is very little dramatic arc to this superficial story; little of import actually happens. The characters are one dimensional, the settings lacking any true sense of time or place; overall, a slight effort and a huge disappointment.

Nothing But a Smile has an interesting setting and a great cover, but the novel falls short of its potential. It is too obviously plot-driven; characters are used to move the story along, not to do what comes naturally from who they are as characters. Take for example Chesty, the absent husband. When his buddy Wink comes back early from the war and meets Chesty's chesty wife, it's obvious they are going to get together, but in the chaste world of this story, they can't while there's an overseas hubby to pine for. You can quickly guess whether or not Chesty is going to make it home or not.

And the story is chaste, despite being a description of the world of 1940's smutmongers. Sal would never cheat on her husband, and Wink makes a show of looking around for a new place to live whenever Sal accidentally kisses him or sniffs his shirt. There is no hint of the seedy underbelly of sin that underlies the surface of conservative morality of 1940's America a la James Ellroy, and when the authorities come sniffing around their soft porn operation it's depicted as persecution. And yet there is still a disturbing amount of talk about "boners" and "waxing the dolphin" and those awkward "Chesty" jokes.

The historical era of the story's setting seems to go by without ever affecting the story itself. A young intern named "Hef" comes through the pinup operation with wild ideas about revolutionizing the soft core porn industry, but winds up another throwaway character, a brief aside like HUAC, J. Edgar Hoover, and V-J day.

The ending is ambiguous; without making an overt judgement, the story shows that the choices the characters have made impact where they'll be living for the rest of their lives, and then lets it drop. There's no character arc here, no sense of what they've learned or how they've changed, just a summing up by one of the now elderly characters in the epilogue.

Nothing But a Smile is the first novel on the Texas Library Association's grownup reading list this summer. I was really excited to read a book chosen by a bunch of book lovers. However, I was not impressed.

This novel has all the earmarks of a great story, except there's not enough elaboration in any of the episodes that could have made this "legendary authorship." I don't feel like I really know the characters, and the female characters, in particular, don't ring true. It's a pretty outrageous move for a 20 something in the 1940's to decide to shoot naked pictures of herself so she can hold on to a store in downtown Chicago. Sounds more like a pseudo feminist statement made by a man who doesn't really get it--fair damsel must revert to a variation of the oldest profession when her bread winner leaves for war.

The frame story doesn't do much to add to the novel's message. The jump from old Sal 1st person point of view to the variety of 3rd person viewpoints in other sections of the story don't connect with the plot in a meaningful way. So she's old. So the stuff in the trunk is also hers. So what?

Finally, both of the war heroes (Sally's husbands 1 and 2), are killed (#1) or maimed (#2) for very non-heroic reasons. If his intent is to do a postmodern subversion of cultural norms from this period, he doesn't do a very good job. It's hard to figure out what Amick denigrates and what he privileges.

Wink Dutton, an artist sidelined by wartime injury, finds himself in Chicago with very little money and even less in the way of prospects. He reaches out to Sal Chesterton, the wife of his buddy still in the Pacific, and together they try to keep her Chicago camera shop going. The idea Sal comes up with, before Wink even enters the picture is a bawdy one - she's going to give boys a peek at what they're fighting for, and make a few bucks at the same time.

The era is beautifully evoked by Amick, and I especially loved the discussions of what makes a photograph eye-catching and thought-provoking. There were several interesting characters who moved the plot forward and the decisions that each character made were believable and understandable. I loved the natural writing about sexual themes and behavior - so many writers discussing this era seem to think that people were found under cabbage leaves. Make no mistake, this is a novel written by an adult for adults, so the frank dialog may bother more sensitive readers.

The premise is brilliant and the writing is fast-paced. I only had one minor complaint with the execution. It's painfully clear that a man is writing dialogue for the women present here, and not only does he not have a good grasp on how women actually speak, but he also hasn't done a lot of thinking about how they spoke in the 1940s. There are a lot of cliched "now listen here, buster[s]" and in those instances, the dialogue sounded like it came out of a B-movie. In an otherwise tightly-written, intelligent novel, that was a disappointment.

Because of the frame the author chose to use, any insightful reader can see the end of the novel coming from page one. I spent most of the book impatiently waiting for "the other shoe to drop" because it's clear that our two main characters were going to wind up together. When they do make it legal, the reader has to sit through another nearly hundred pages where not a whole lot happens. I was also a little irritated by the way the author seemed to be making the novel, which was set for the most part in Chicago, sound like a advertisement for the Michigan Board of Tourism. Yes, it was a sweet story of a simpler time, and the characters were all very nice, upstanding citizens in spite of their naughty sideline, but I would have enjoyed a little more conflict, the feeling that more was at stake for these people. If everyone in post-WWII America was this darn nice and open-minded, why did we have McCarthyism, the Korean War, or a need for the Civil Rights movement anyway?