A well-crafted literary satire with something to say about genre fiction.
A character attempts to make her author a better writer in this comic novel from Diamond (To Hell With Johnny Manic, 2019, etc.).
Author Wanda Wiley’s subconscious has a long-term resident. She’s Hannah Sharpe—a willful runaway who has failed to make the final draft of any of Wanda’s 18 romance novels due to her recalcitrant personality—who lives in a Victorian farmhouse surrounded by foggy, nebulous Nowhere. Now the political thriller that Wanda is ghostwriting, The President Has Been Stolen, has produced a roommate for Hannah. Trevor Dunwoody is a not-too-bright alpha male who doesn’t immediately grasp that he is temporarily out of his book, stashed—like Hannah—in a timeless netherworld. Hannah would love to get away from Trevor and onto the pages of a real novel, but Wanda can’t come up with anything for her. Wiley’s imagination isn’t helped by all the marijuana she’s smoking to self-medicate her depression, the result of her six-and-a-half-year toxic relationship to skirt-chasing professor Dirk Jaworski. Can Hannah enlist Trevor in her effort to inspire Wanda to leave Dirk, get a grip, and write them out of their depressing morass? Or will the insidious influence of selfish men—in Wanda’s personal life and in the publishing industry—keep Hannah trapped forever? Diamond’s prose is funny and barbed, particularly the dialogue between Hannah and Trevor. He takes aim at genre conventions and their unrealistic treatment of characters. “You’ve been living in a world of male fantasy,” Hannah tells Trevor about the series of which he is the star. “In the real world, not every woman is a hot babe. In the real world, the forensic scientist earns her position through brains and hard work. And not every woman falls into bed with a man just because…he has a big pistol and is good at shooting it off.” Wanda’s waking life, which involves insecurities surrounding her career and relationship as well as a new potential romantic partner, serves as an emotional ballast against the metafictional struggles of Hannah. Together, their narratives make an argument for better fiction that is both clever and surprisingly compelling.
A well-crafted literary satire with something to say about genre fiction.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9963507-9-2
Page Count: 186
Publisher: Stolen Time Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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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