A pleasing modern-day addition to the venerable lineage of the English social novel, easily the equal of Trollope or...
Benjamin Trotter, his friends and family return, even more at sea in a transformed Britain than they were 20 years ago at the close of The Rotters’ Club (2002).
The sharp eye for the socioeconomic landscape that distinguished Coe’s previous outing is also quickly evident here, as Claire Newman describes London in December 1999: “There are vast numbers of people who don’t work in this city anymore, in the sense of making things or selling things. All that seems to be considered rather old-fashioned.” Claire has returned after years living in Italy, but her school chum Benjamin is just as bemused back in their hometown, Birmingham, where he’s senior partner in an accounting firm, still working on the novel that was supposed to make his name decades ago and still mooning over Cicely Boyd, though he’s been married to long-suffering Emily for years. Benjamin may have retained the socialist values of their parents, but he’s just as self-absorbed as younger brother Paul, an eager-beaver junior member of Tony Blair’s business-friendly New Labor government. Both men are fascinated by a young woman named Malvina, who becomes Paul’s “media advisor” and later his lover before a heavily foreshadowed revelation about her parentage provides the story’s climax. There are several other flamboyant plot twists involving members of the once-close, now slightly ill-at-ease circle of friends that also includes journalists Doug Anderton (by this time married to an aristocrat) and Philip Chase (Claire’s ex). But the real point here is Coe’s acid, bitingly funny portrait of early-21st century Britain, where the cradle-to-grave welfare state has been abandoned as “a now comically outdated democratic ideal” and cab drivers knowledgably discuss varieties of wine (“Australian Shiraz, you know, something fruity and mellow”). His characters never come quite as vividly to life, though they’re generally decent, intelligent, well-meaning people with believable personalities and problems.
A pleasing modern-day addition to the venerable lineage of the English social novel, easily the equal of Trollope or Galsworthy, though without the imaginative fire of Dickens.Pub Date: May 31, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-41415-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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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