Wonderful characters elbow each other for room on a crowded stage. It’s a bit like a sunnier Bruce Wagner, but newcomer...
A gifted public relations practitioner’s black arts are fouled by his own pesky humanity.
Scott Singer has sailed willingly into the perfect p.r. storm. Fresh from a qualified triumph involving the use of naked but sincere feminists to rescue the image of a lavish but languishing resort, the lanky, loveless 35-year-old has accepted a truly daunting challenge. Gifted, unfairly handsome, philandering rap artist Hunta, né Jeremy Sharpe, would be on top of the recording scene were it not for the recent school shooting for which the musical and dramatic theme was Hunta's hit Bitch Fiend. It’s not just that the cultural police are waiting to throw him in chains. Lisa Glassman, the uncredited co-author of one of his best recordings, is about to charge him with rape. For all his gangsta posing (he was present at Tupac’s shooting), Hunta is a pretty straight guy trying to live up to his father's tough standards without losing his badass credentials. But neither the press nor the public will remember his softer side when the rape charge comes out. Working with p.r. legend and African-American specialist Maxina Howard, Scott proposes deployment of a deflatable rape charge from another quarter to preempt Lisa’s accusation. But Harmony Prince, the woman he picks to cry wolf, presents her own set of problems. Her wretched ghetto past has left her so emotionally vulnerable that Scott’s may finish her off. Worse, as he is falling a little bit in love with the brilliant, deaf mother of his 13-yer-old assistant, Scott is also falling a little bit in love with Harmony. The brilliant but doomed plan starts to collapse on Larry King Live when Hunta’s long-suffering wife Simba phones in just as Harmony is telling all.
Wonderful characters elbow each other for room on a crowded stage. It’s a bit like a sunnier Bruce Wagner, but newcomer Price is his own man.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6234-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
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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