This powerfully imagined tale of a contemporary Bonnie and Clyde displays Smith's (Chimney Rock, 1993, etc.) furious overplotting and near-genius for lyrical intensity in just about equal measure. Jack Baker and Clare Manigault, a married pair who've been robbing banks and exploring their own commingled eroticism and lawlessness throughout 18 years together, are portrayed during their climactic odyssey through the South and Midwest—back to ``the evil spirit'' of her family that Clare fears and the vortex of suicidal hatred that dominated Jack's childhood. Smith's plot is driven by the lust for revenge exhibited by Clare's father, Francis, determined to hunt down the bastard son who murdered his ``legal'' half-brother, and by the avaricious malice of Donnie Bernardnick, a philosophical ex-con who schemes to draw Jack back into his destructive orbit. These, and others who surround them and sometimes become their victims, are drawn with sure broad strokes. They are looming grotesques whose inmost fears and desires are analyzed with a passionate urgency reminiscent, believe it or not, of Dostoyevsky: That's how good Smith can be when he's at his best. He's superb on the turmoil of motives that make Jack (in his own words) ``an obscure functionary in the cavalcade of crime.'' (Clare, by contrast, is comparatively opaque—seen essentially as Jack sees her.) We catch ourselves wishing Jack weren't portrayed as quite so self-probingly articulate; yet Smith's point has to do with the varieties of criminal experience and the different places such wholesale surrender to the demands of the id can take us. Violent acts and deaths abound here; some are so outrÇ that they are almost unintentionally comic. Almost. The book stares you down, dares you to laugh. Even the most willing reader may have trouble initially entering Smith's fever-pitched world. Once you're hooked, though, you're in it for the duration. This unforgettably vivid account of a dangerous journey is a real trip.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1996
ISBN: 0-8050-3797-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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