A stylishly structured and poetically described family tale hampered by an improbable key moment.
An Italian American showgirl gives up her daughter for love in this novel.
The story opens with the aging Lina “Lila” Granatelli looking over old photographs in the living room of her elegant Palm Beach, Florida, home. A former stage performer, Lila examines a wartime photo that was given to servicemen who attended her shows. Meanwhile, a piano tuner works on her white baby grand—a wedding present given to Lila by her husband—which she has not played in the 15 years since he died. The tale flips back to the late 1930s with Lila, who has adopted the stage name Lila Grand, beginning her career in the chorus of a Broadway musical. Lila finds herself pregnant by Joe Prince, a fellow cast member who, pursuing his career, leaves her to raise her child alone. Two months after giving birth to Gloria, Lila is back on Broadway and becomes something of a minor celebrity. She meets and falls in love with Willie Burke, a wealthy New Yorker whose family owns a construction business. The Burke family is appalled by the fact the Willie intends to marry a single mother. Lila is told by Willie that Gloria won’t be living with them. Lila reluctantly gives her child to her brother and sister-in-law to raise as their own in St. Louis. But a harrowing legal battle and emotional turmoil ensue when Willie discovers that he is infertile and asks Lila to take the now-8-year-old Gloria back as their own. Bachner (Last Clear Chance, 2015) is capable of writing deeply moving passages, including describing a mother’s love for her young daughter. Early in the story, Lila and her baby daughter share this tender moment on the street: “Lila started the kissing game, quickly kissing Gloria in one corner of her face and then another while Gloria tried to catch her with her hands. This time Gloria was successful, and the chubby fingers grasped Lila’s nose for a moment. They both laughed.” Such episodes make Lila’s decision concerning her daughter—agreeing to give up Gloria so readily—deeply implausible. At first, Lila balks at the suggestion, reacting violently, but she’s later persuaded. Besides Lila’s precocious love for Willie and some sketchy advice from a priest referencing Moses, the author does not provide a sufficiently persuasive set of motives for this abrupt reversal. Bachner’s previous novel was criticized for its prolixity—his second offering has a better pace, and his observations are crisper and more condensed. Describing Lila in old age, he writes: “This is her final stage: an elegant, flightless butterfly, subsisting without nourishment or effort as her one day’s sun completes its circuit.” Yet the tale hinges on a scene that the author struggles to make believable—and this proves to be a major flaw. This is an elegantly written book weakened by a storyline most readers will question.
A stylishly structured and poetically described family tale hampered by an improbable key moment.Pub Date: July 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68433-302-8
Page Count: 253
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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