Beach readers may find sand gnats more entertaining.
Lee, the much younger ex-wife of Billy Joel, debuts with a novel whose self-important heroine is a famous actor’s much younger wife who leaves him (with prenup) when he cheats on her only to find true love weeks later with her surf instructor.
Screenwriter Emma is at a Metropolitan Museum of Art gala when she catches “blockbuster movie star” husband Garrett kissing her old friend Lily. Flash back seven years to the beginning of the romance between Emma and Garrett. While Lily, then her college roommate, is rich and spoiled, Emma is a scholarship student from Kentucky who also manages to be a killer dresser. She dreams of becoming a screenwriter (her telling all-time favorites: Dirty Dancing, When Harry Met Sally and Breakfast at Tiffany’s). Working on a movie set, Lily quickly catches Garrett’s eye. Despite his reputation as a womanizer, he falls hard for Emma. Soon they are dining at fine restaurants (names provided) and hanging out in his suite at the Carlyle. She cuts short her family Christmas to vacation on his yacht near St. Bart’s and buy $12,000 of clothing on his credit card. At the wedding that soon follows, Emma slights Lily, sharing the ceremony’s big secret only with her childhood friend Grace. Grace becomes Emma’s personal assistant and finds an adorable West Village apartment. Garrett moves Emma into a fab Soho loft and finances her screenplay debut, the story of their romance—a huge hit. Emma’s struggling to conceive a second script when her marriage collapses. She kicks Garrett out and decamps, at Grace’s suggestion, to Mexico to recuperate. There she discovers the spiritual power of surfing, especially after she and her hunky surf instructor have “sex for hours.” Could a whole new life be on the horizon?
Beach readers may find sand gnats more entertaining.Pub Date: June 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8359-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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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