A chatty, self-absorbed, you-know-what-I-mean style isn’t enough to keep Lucinda from being continually outclassed by the...
A half-successful debut novel from essayist Daum (My Misspent Youth, 2001) follows a lifestyle-obsessed Manhattan TV producer as she relocates to a bland midwestern prairie town.
When her apartment rent abruptly triples, Lucinda Trout, 29, figures it’s time to make a consciousness-raising move to Prairie City (“Open Arms, Open Minds”), a place she visited briefly for a segment on methamphetamine-addicted housewives for her vapid, early-morning TV show, New York Up Early. Lucinda is fed up with her usual journalistic work, aimed at neurotic New Yorkers—segments about thong underwear and adopted Chinese babies on the Upper West Side—and demoralized also both by the inanities of her bitchy boss, Fay Figaro, and by the competition for the hopelessly few available men in the city. So she proposes a “Quality of Life Report” that will cover an entire year in Prairie City, a segment that would allow New Yorkers to indulge in fantasies of the good life with cheap, spacious apartments, abundant “bad boys” to date, and big parties (in barns) costing under $300. But only in theory does the move satisfy Lucinda’s yearning to go in a “serious, more humanitarian direction.” She taps into the local feminist circuit of recovering, empowering, chain-smoking, aging harridans; finds herself the romantic interest of numerous, albeit unsavory, men; and even moves into a genuine farmhouse with her hickish Sam Shepard fantasy, Mason. Trouble is that taciturn woodsman Mason, who shares custody of his three children by three different lovers, ends up addicted to meth while Lucinda’s project about the heartland idyll gradually comes to be seen as a cynical exploitation of the well-meaning natives. And when outraged boss Faye arrives to redirect Lucinda’s shoots in order to eliminate any fat, badly dressed people from appearing on camera, the reader winces at the collapse of Daum’s skittish irony
A chatty, self-absorbed, you-know-what-I-mean style isn’t enough to keep Lucinda from being continually outclassed by the forgiving Prairie City locals.Pub Date: May 12, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03213-1
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
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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