Swan Boats at Four

by George V. Higgins

Book Overview

Aboard a deluxe ocean liner, a middle-aged couple with financial and marital problems are pigeonholed by a charming confidence man with a mission, and the three exchange revealing stories about their... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805030778
• ISBN13: 9780805030778
• Release Date: May 1995
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
• Length: 228 Pages
• Weight: 1.06 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Masterful Entertainment

This book is perfect for those who enjoy sublte insights and manipulations in a novel! The author takes you on an internal journey as his characters take their transAtlantic cruise. As noted by another reviewer (who provides a synopsis of the story), Higgins also provides a VERY INTERESTING ending to satisfy his readers. In response to the ZZZZZ review....the problem is not with the book....this reader was obviously not suited to this style of writing...If you enjoy a good read, and enjoy taking time savoring what you are reading....then this is a book for you!

Elegy for the Good Life

Swan Boats at Four is perhaps the greatest tour-de-force of unreliable narration I've ever seen, and now that Higgins is no longer with us, most of us won't live to see it surpassed: none of its four central chracters are to be believed, but boy do they talk, at length and rewardingly, in the best and most entertaining Higginsese. Sailing on a costly transAtlantic liner are an adulterous banker and his care-worn wife, the banker's former mistress, who happens now to be a ship's officer, and best of all, a dapper, elderly gent who may be a former lawyer, and is certainly the glibbest talker Higgins ever crafted in his decades of crafting glib fictional talkers.We early find out that the banker couple are traveling to avoid facing his home-front problems with bank auditors--he keeps telling everyone, with decreasing credibility, the problems are not his fault, she--similarly-- that things are bound to turn out fine. We know that the mistress (she rapidly renews her relationship with the banker) and the old gent are in cahoots. Beyond this, most of the story is in the old gent's words, which we intermittently understand may all be fiction within the fiction-- the town he affectionately describes as his own; the law practice he inherited and left behind; the woman he loved whose demise has just left him a widower; even the fashionable downtown Boston club he claims to have saved from extinction with his sage leadership--may all be pure fabrication. The mystery of the tale is as to why he attaches himself to this particular couple and bedazzles them. And the overwhelming answer is one zinger of an ending that left me short of breath.