Robinson's seventh book is a New Hollywood sequel to Perdido (1978) in which the follies of the older generation continue to provide the best dirt. Recalled from London to L.A. by the drive-by shooting of her best friend, journalist Kate Alder Stone, Alexandra Zachary, normally happy heading her independent production company abroad, can't help chafing under the news that Victor Levanin International (VLI), the studio her great-grandfather founded and his heirs grandly squandered, is once again on the block. Alex's need to share the news of Kate's death with her lifelong love, Oscared leading man King Ryder, has already put him back in her Rolodex again. Also back in her life, if not between her sheets, is her despicable ex Rick Stone, powerful head of rival studio SMS, the man she married on the rebound from King's marriage, and the one who left her with a precocious daughter but not a single good memory. When Rick confirms the rumor that he's the leading suitor for VLI, Alex grows determined to outbid his billion- dollar offer, even though it means going hat in hand to her remote parents, her buddies in the business, and her actress friend Polo Montana's husband Baron Solder Task, the German Ted Turner. But how can Alex ever raise all that money in time to beat Rick when there are so many limos to take, so many childhood traumas to recall, so many pithy apothegms about Old Hollywood to recycle (``You knew if you had presence by five. By seven you were on to your best angles. . . .''), so many names to drop with a clatter (``You had an amazing childhood; you met the Kennedys, Paul Newman, Toni Morrison, Martin Luther King, danced with Gene Kelly. . . . You've been in the greatest private projection rooms in the world'')? Kate's death, by the way, will turn out to be no casual accident, unlike almost everything else in this gaspingly star- struck dinosaur, whose DNA seems to have been preserved in amber ever since the studio era.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-449-90861-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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