Screenwriter Wagner's second well-done Hollywood novel (Force Majeure, 1991) surveys the mostly sordid L.A. scene from top to bottom, making up for a lack of dramatic focus with lots of hypergossipy vignettes of hustling, deviance, New Age goofiness, and consumer lust—and that's just among the successful. Wagner's bitchy narrative compiles an index of Hollywood types from pathetic wannabes and has-beens to lucky arrivistes and powerbrokers. Their degrees of separation are much lower than you'd expect, forming a daisy-chain of odd relations, with such sites in common as a children-with-AIDS benefit, a New Age seminar, and restaurants where the help is always on the entertainment make. Mostly, though, Wagner's characters speak in manic monologues, and the result is a cacophony of disembodied cellular voices. They include those of the dying wife of a producer, her hot-shot ICM agent-son, a Big Star with a taste for drugs and melodrama, her drug-pushing doctor, and a psychiatrist's son who makes a living cleaning out dead animals from houses. Women sound off in various genres: A producer hoping to remake Pasolini's Teorema pens her memoir † la Julia Phillips; an insane masseuse claims in her manuscript to have conceived the hottest TV shows; a waitress turned porn star commits her aspirations to a diary; and a TV casting director, hoping to be a movie producer, writes letters to her newborn son, blind from birth and rejected by his coke-addled dad. Wagner dips his pen deep in venom for his portraits of truly despicable characters like mega-hit producer Zev Turtletaub, an obnoxious member of the gay elite, who treats his assistant like a sex slave and has little time for his own sister, dying of AIDS. Much smarter than the recent bunch of novels and movies on Hollywood, and much more believable for its very lack of a narrative hook.
Pub Date: July 17, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41927-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
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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