A melodramatic coming-of-age story with an offensive protagonist.
In actor, producer, and screenwriter Barnes’ debut novel, an aspiring young writer is seduced by Hollywood society life.
Conrad Arlington, a self-described “Last True Artist,” leaves his provincial hometown to move to Los Angeles and pursue his dream of becoming a writer. Later, he meets Gracie Garrison, a seasoned Hollywood socialite, with whom he immediately falls in love. Thus begins Conrad’s descent into what he calls “the great sickness,” as he finds himself helplessly trailing after the elusive Gracie to high-profile cocktail parties, iconic hotel bars, and lusty nightclubs along Hollywood Boulevard and beyond. In doing so, Conrad alternates between railing against himself for caving to his own foolishness and railing against Gracie for her superficiality, her secretiveness, and, most of all, the extent to which he’s crazy about her, in spite of it all. The longer he trails after her, the more determined he becomes to know her secrets, so Conrad tears through LA, drinking heavily, mining Gracie’s acquaintances for answers, and destroying relationships. These obsessional benders are interspersed with periods of forced isolation in which Conrad tries to reckon with his behavior and salvage his creative life. This novel gives readers a mildly intriguing behind-the-scenes peek at the glamorous, corrupting party culture of the Hollywood Hills. The tension between Conrad’s creative ambitions and the way in which love causes him to abandon them is what drives the novel. However, the curiosity that this tension will rouse in the reader is tepid, at best, as the narrator has an unrelenting penchant for arrogance, melodrama, and misogyny. His Hollywood is a sexist, clichéd dystopia in which women exist to accessorize male executives who pass the time draining decanters of scotch and scamming bright-eyed young creatives. Further, the prose is often hyperbolic (“I wanted to kiss her everywhere! Her eyelids! Her nose! Her cheeks! Her mouth! I wanted to see her fully, all golden and silver in the pressing darkness!”). For all the credit that Conrad gives himself for being “The Last True Artist,” he has a surprising lack of awareness of the inanity of his perceptions.
A melodramatic coming-of-age story with an offensive protagonist.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9991610-1-2
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Magic Hour Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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