Achingly beautiful and filled with heart-wrenchingly real characters: one of Hoffman’s best.
A Yale senior loses his way on Long Island, and three generations suffer the consequences in this haunting latest from Hoffman (The Ice Queen, 2005, etc.).
Convinced that he’s the true love she promised herself as her father lay dying, orphaned 17-year-old Arlie Singer seduces John Moody moments after he stops to ask for directions. Stunned by his recklessness, the normally cautious and tidy John hightails it back to college. But Arlie will not be denied, so they are married too young, have baby Sam too soon and, after John’s parents move to Florida, are trapped full-time in the Glass Slipper, an all-windows house designed by his father, a famous architect. John ignores his own brilliant, odd son and hardly ever comes home from work. Arlie, realizing she’s made a terrible mistake, falls in love with George Snow, who washes the Glass Slipper’s windows. She won’t leave Sam, even after she has George’s baby—John, typically, seems oblivious—but she’s stricken with breast cancer and dead at 25. Sam grows up angry and bereft; at 16, he has a full-fledged drug habit, and even his devoted ten-year-old sister Blanca can’t keep him in the house he hates with the father he loathes. Hoffman spins a grim fairy tale, complete with an unsympathetic stepmother (Cynthia, who was sleeping with John before Arlie died) and a strange nanny (Meredith, who follows John to Connecticut because she’s the only one besides him who sees Arlie’s ghost hovering around). But while unsparingly depicting the awful damage unhappy people inflict on each other, the author refuses to provide villains; even clueless, thoughtless John is at heart terrified and remorseful. His final actions suggest that it’s never too late to see the truth, and that terrible mistakes can sometimes be at least partially atoned for—but this is a very sad story. Nonetheless, the ending offers hope for Blanca and a surprising posthumous redemption for desperate, doomed Sam.
Achingly beautiful and filled with heart-wrenchingly real characters: one of Hoffman’s best.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2007
ISBN: 0-316-05878-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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