Scratch the willing suspension of disbelief. But never mind: this is good fun, and lots of it. And besides, anyone who...
A rollicking spoof by B-list actor Campbell, hero of the Evil Dead series, who attempts to rise above his station and wreaks havoc in the bargain.
There is a B-list, and there is the A-list, and never the twain shall meet, especially for the fellow who, like the author, just happens to be named Bruce Campbell, a man who ostensibly romances leading women but really “hoards Victoria’s Secret catalogs” and is otherwise a bit of a nebbish. Bizarrely, as if in an alternate-universe setup from one of the myriad Sci-Fi channel shows on which Campbell can be seen, Mike Nichols requests him to play the role of a wisecracking doorman in his next film, a hip update of Let’s Make Love, with Renée Zellweger and Richard Gere in the place of Marilyn Monroe and Yves Montand. Campbell dutifully appears on location, layers his lines with a hammy backstory of his own concoction and amazes his fellow actors by his very presence. Things get better, and soon Campbell, secret agent of schlock, is running his lines with Richard Gere, coaching Renée’s costume designer and the star herself in B-tricks for accentuating breasts and bottom, and even outing the great cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (not Sigmund, as Campbell has it) as the filmic force behind long-forgotten embarrassments such as Psycho a Go-Go and Wild and Willing. Enter, as the story unfolds, the likes of Robert Evans and Jack Nicholson (who’s contemplating capping off Chinatown, about water, and The Two Jakes, about oil, with a film about vinegar), and the A-world begins to take on deeper shades of B. The story takes silly twists—well, sillier than what’s come before—as Campbell eludes SWAT team shooters and feds before winding up in the slam, where, “with a little ingenuity and two cartons of Kool Extras, I worked my way up to cleaning executive offices.”
Scratch the willing suspension of disbelief. But never mind: this is good fun, and lots of it. And besides, anyone who allows that Carrot Top’s agent is Satan is all right.Pub Date: June 13, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-31260-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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