Plot and prose overload, with shades of Alice Sebold’s Lovely Bones.
Southern novelist Fowler (Staircase of a Thousand Steps, 2001, etc.) tries for the profound and moving as she tells of a good woman and friend whose sudden death provokes big questions.
Florida-set, the story is an awkward mix of mystery, gothic ghoul, and politically correct attitudes. A cobbled patchwork of different voices includes those of a transsexual and former Marine troubled by his Vietnam experience; a doctor whose wife recently died from breast cancer; a bad-boy novelist; and the dead Murmur Lee Harp. And the tale they tell is so heavy with foreshadowing that the mystery of Murmur Lee’s death is soon apparent—despite all the purple ink (“I become an ocean tippling in the cupped petals of a morning glory,” etc.). On New Year’s Eve 2001, Murmur Lee, a divorced healer and bar-owner, joins her new lover, novelist Billy Speare, on his boat on the river. They drink and listen to music, but suddenly, when Billy puts on a new and unusual CD, Murmur Lee falls into the dark river and drowns. While Murmur Lee adjusts to being dead, her friends gather in Iris Haven, Murmur’s hometown, to mourn her: among them are the transsexual Edith Piaf, former Marine; Dr. Z, who loved both his wife Katrina and Murmur; Lucinda, a Mennonite artist who also loved Murmur but from a distance; and Charleston Rowena Mudd, a childhood friend who leaves Harvard to join the mourners in Iris Haven. Free in death to visit both past and present, Murmur discovers that she’s a product of a rape, which helps explain her father’s coolness and her mother’s religiosity; revisits her own ecstatic religious experiences, eventually diagnosed as a rare form of epilepsy; recalls how her marriage broke up when her husband couldn’t deal with their small daughter’s fatal leukemia; learns how an ancestor came to give Iris Haven its name, and watches her friends grieve—and move on.
Plot and prose overload, with shades of Alice Sebold’s Lovely Bones.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-49981-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
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
BOOK REVIEW
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