The ravings of a writer who is either on drugs or off his meds.
A novel of contemporary Hollywood, featuring dozens of real celebrities and a few invented ones.
Nominally the story of a lesbian movie star named Dusty Wilding and the intrigues surrounding her search for her long-lost daughter, this book is in such poor taste, so wildly overwritten, and so apparently unedited that its main use is in a party game where people pass it around and read sentences aloud at random. Perhaps you will get this one. “Embedded in the lining of the net, the Fappening’s birth had been inevitable, yet fate and history had chosen him to summon the lava flow of exposed taboo bodymaps—Jennifer Lawrence’s and lesser cousins’—that verily swamped Old Reality, engulfing the pristine, elitist coastal cities of the lascivious, clay-footed gods of TMZ.” Or maybe this one: “ ‘I don’t know,’ said Tessa. ‘I think I’m kinda over it. He says he wants to take me to Turks and Caikos [sic]. I call it Kikes and Jerkoffs…he has this boat. Or says he has a boat. So far, all I’ve seen are fucking pictures. On Instagram. He takes more pictures of that boat than he does of his dick. Whatever.’ ” Or this: “What really galled him was when she said it was ‘okay’ to want to die for a moral cause and went on to invoke burning nuns as if self-immolation was something everyone should aspire to. In the same breath, he admitted there would be something immensely appealing about watching Cara Delevingne, Kendall and Gigi Hadid set themselves on fire in real time on BuzzFeed.” Wagner (Dead Stars, 2012, etc.) knows enough about Hollywood and its denizens to have written a Bret Easton Ellis–style nasty satire. Maybe that book is buried in here somewhere, under the run-on sentences, the scattershot italics, the tedious and constant namedropping, and the five- and seven-page monologues by minor characters, which inevitably contain more italics, namedropping, and demented writing. All that plus the interweaving of a ludicrous melodramatic plot about mistaken parentage, a sex cult, an organ transplant, suicide, and brain trauma is just more than any reader could possibly bear.
The ravings of a writer who is either on drugs or off his meds.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-39915-936-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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
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
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