An innocent and mild-mannered boy grows up fast and ugly as his choice of friends sucks him into another family’s self-destructive tailspin: a relentlessly hardscrabble debut. In the northern reaches of rural Vermont, where dirt roads are fast tracks for renegades and every house and trailer hides a tragedy, 16-year-old Jessup is simply trying to come to terms with a first awkward romance. After going the whole season without kissing the girl who was a summer visitor, he’s now left with fishing and daydreaming to occupy his time. All that changes, however, on the day when Reg nearly runs him over as Jessup is trying to hitch a ride after his bike breaks down. Reg is older, a hard-driving, hard-drinking, hard-nosed ex-con with a big marijuana harvest to haul out of the mountains and a grudge against a local pair of brothers who are also in the cultivation business and whom he blames for sending him to prison. He gives Jessup a ride to remember, first introducing him to his family: wheelchair-bound Hal, a weight-guessing barker at county fairs; and Marigold, whose married life hasn't been the same since her logger husband lopped off a piece of his equipment with the chainsaw. Hal and Reg get Jessup so stoned, drunk, and dizzy that he’s sick. Then Marigold comes on to him, and when the night is over the boy hardly knows who he is anymore. Worse, the dark side to Reg is swiftly triggered when, in his cabin, he finds a cousin all shot up amid the pot plants. He hatches a malevolent plan, with Jessup’s unwitting aid, that’s somewhere between suicidal and just crazy. When the smoke clears, Jessup is battered, traumatized by all he’s seen, and utterly alone. Absent fathers are the supposed reason for this whole misadventure. Maybe, but the characters move at the speed of light toward rack and ruin, and the psychology can't keep up.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-88517-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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