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
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
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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