Mostly unmemorable people, but a witty satire, nonetheless, about the lives of the idle and beautiful.
The glittering if ephemeral distractions of life in the City of Angels are lampooned with a wry, knowing touch, in a funny first novel by a writer who grew up “surrounded by the movie industry.”
Everyone knows that if you live in L.A., you drive everywhere. Even when the destination is just to the corner, the sidewalks serve only an ornamental purpose. So Mina’s insistence on walking just about everywhere she goes seems not just strange to her friends and husband but more than a little affected. Affectation, however, is the name of the game for almost everyone here. Mina’s best friend, Lorena, is a walking encyclopedia of fashion, her antennae tuned to the slightest shiftings in the cultural winds. Mina herself is the underachieving, neurotic daughter of a once-wealthy film-industry family who now spends her time working in one of Lorena’s restaurants, squabbling with her screenwriter husband, David, and having affairs with two other men. She’s always late to everything and doesn’t have much purpose in life or a driving need to find one. The story, which amounts to little more than interior musings by the characters as they go about their daily routines, is mostly an excuse for Spiotta to engage in some amusing takes on the post-everything ennui of modern-day Los Angeles—including a chain of holistic-therapy clinics where clients cure their inner ills with programs like Tactile Hue Therapy and Spiritual Exfoliation and Detoxification. A featherweight dusting of surreal comedy keeps the proceedings engagingly light but grow disorienting when Spiotta tries to dig into deeper territory. The peripheral character of Lisa, Lorena’s cleaning woman, is depicted without the sure hand Spiotta brings to her other, non–working-class characters. Meanwhile, Lisa’s situation, with her money woes, angry husband, and demanding children, comes off as fake and artificial, the author resorting to cultural clichés when she ventures into what seems to be unfamiliar territory.
Mostly unmemorable people, but a witty satire, nonetheless, about the lives of the idle and beautiful.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1261-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
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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