Even the most nostalgic reader will be sick of all the brand names and band names by the time Dunn manages to combine...
The Rolling Stone reporter and memoirist (But Enough About Me: A Jersey Girl’s Unlikely Adventures Among the Absurdly Famous, 2006) remembers the ’80s in her first novel.
In her 30s, Lillian Curtis is old before her time. Her idea of fun is eating creamed chicken on toast with the septuagenarian talk-show host who is not only her boss but her best friend. She discovers that her husband wants more excitement out of life when she arrives home one night—looking forward to an evening of comfy socks and pizza—and he tells her that their marriage is over. In the midst of a break-up and with nowhere to live in Manhattan, Lillian goes back to her parents’ house in New Jersey. Removed from her adult life and settled into her girlhood room—a shrine to her teen years that hasn’t changed a bit since the late ’80s—Lillian has a chance to be young again. In fact, with her 20-year reunion on the horizon, Lillian not only reconnects with her adolescent girlfriends, she also gets another shot with the mysterious, alluring guy who might have been her one true love. Dunn understands that, to a reader of a certain age, the idea of experiencing John Hughes-style romance one more time is irresistible, and she can be a sharp, funny writer. But it turns out that Lillian was a loser and a jerk in high school—she let boys walk all over her, she threw over her fat friend to be popular—and she becomes a loser and a jerk all over again when she tries to recapture the thrills of youth. By the time Lillian begins to realize this about herself, the reader might be too fed up with her to feel she deserves yet another chance. And the ’80s references wear thin pretty quickly, too.
Even the most nostalgic reader will be sick of all the brand names and band names by the time Dunn manages to combine Tretorns and the Violent Femmes in the same sentence.Pub Date: July 29, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-345-50190-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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