The satirical swipes at Tinseltown are missing here, apart from that funeral scene. The rest is all Suzanne, and she’s just...
Novelist/actress/screenwriter Fisher offers a sequel to Postcards From the Edge (1987), with many of the same elements: another head-trip with a lost Hollywood soul—and drugs, drugs, drugs.
Since we last saw her, Suzanne Vale had married and had a child. Studio exec Leland was sweet, caring and great in bed; still, he left her three years ago . . . for a guy. So darling daughter Honey, now six, has become Suzanne’s focus, except when Suzanne is gigging as a cable talk-show hostess or sending little Honey off to Leland. But why must Leland have a much better TV, and regular folks for parents, in contrast to her own flaky showbiz mom? And how has she managed so long without sex? The drought ends with a successful play for Dean Bradbury (“Hollywood’s original bad boy”) at a producer’s funeral. The pair’s one-night stand is followed by a longer run with Thor, a towering blond who brings out the slut in Suzanne, which also means giving up the meds she needs for her bipolar whatever, which is when all hell breaks loose. Suzanne destroys her patio in the middle of the night, has her hair cut off, gets a tattoo, and drives to Tijuana with the tattoo artist. Okay, he’s an ex-con, but he’s loaded with OxyContins. Meanwhile, never a thought for Honey. Rescued by best friend Craig, Suzanne messes up her new meds and winds up in the nuthouse, not such a great change from the world outside: people continue to loom up out of the drug-spangled mists, and Suzanne’s just-kidding wordplay never stops, though receiving a secret message from an old movie on TV is a new low point. Eventually, Suzanne will be released into a happy ending: a kinda sorta reunion with Leland.
The satirical swipes at Tinseltown are missing here, apart from that funeral scene. The rest is all Suzanne, and she’s just not interesting enough to sustain the attention.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2004
ISBN: 0-684-80913-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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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