Thirty-five years after her death, Marilyn Monroe lives, and dies, again in this collection of 21 new stories. Although only Eileen Dreyer acknowledges that ``I'm not as interested in Marilyn Monroe as I am in the image of Marilyn Monroe,'' the same is equally true of all the contributors here, because Monroe's life and personality have been so relentlessly mythologized over the years that even attempts to get at the real Monroe behind the breathlessly seductive image end up settling for a remarkably homogenous set of ``real'' myths. Whether she's hiring a shamus at the dawn of her career (Martin and Annette Meyers), rescuing Khrushchev from assassination (Barbara Collins), scanning her horoscopes for the weekend of her death (J.N. Williamson), conversing with the death angel (Billie Sue Mosiman), joining forces with a mother-daughter pair of thieves (T.J. MacGregor), telling a medium about her abused childhood (Melissa Mia Hall), or bearing John Kennedy's love-child (Peter Crowther and editor Douglas, though there are broad hints in many more stories and a neat twist on the theme by Jill M. Morgan), Norma Jeane Mortenson is monotonously wise, sensitive, professional, well-read, vulnerable, and a sucker for kids. It's frustrating to see a myth turned inside-out so often in such banal terms. The most successful stories are those that use Monroe's myth instead of trying to get beyond it by putting Monroe on 165th Street (Linda Mannheim) or in the underworld (Elizabeth Ann Scarborough) or a drag queen's arms (Janet Berliner and George Guthridge). Fortunately, the two most ambitious stories, Carolyn Wheat's kaleidoscopic account of filming Some Like It Hot and Nancy Pickard's fable about the week that Monroe's healing image miraculously appeared on Mt. Rushmore, are also the best. Douglas (Cat With an Emerald Eye, 1996, etc.) provides waves of delight for Monroephiles, though there's not much illumination deeper than Gloria Steinem's neo-feminist analysis.
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-85737-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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