An entertaining, deeply imagined literary melodrama.
Oddball New Jersey kids grow up with family values that grow increasingly sinister in McConnell’s labyrinthine coming-of-age novel.
The author centers the story on Darius Van Nest, an eccentric elementary school student at Lawrence Academy in Westerbrook, New Jersey, who’s convinced of his own “illustriousness” and fixated, to the dismay of his English teacher, Jane Brzostovsky, on the incestuous dysfunctions of the infamous Borgia family. Darius’ adoptive parents—his wealthy father Oliver, who’s given to nasty put-downs and Holocaust denial; and his mother Sohaila, a beautiful and shallow Iranian immigrant—are equally off-kilter, especially after Oliver lets Sohaila move her lover into the mansion. Darius’ only friend is classmate Barry Paul, an ordinary 12-year-old kid who’s abused by a manipulative adult, which leaves festering psychological wounds. McConnell follows these characters through the 1980s and ’90s. Darius drifts through Columbia University, Paris, and relationships with several men, including Alan Wilkinson, an aloof student of the philosophy of mathematics; and Rolf, a kindly German aristocrat. Jane is roped into a scheme by Darius’ childhood French tutor, David Caperini, to sell valuable artworks stolen from the Van Nest mansion, and Barry returns home after years out West and reconnects with a wealthy lawyer, Preston Sayles. McConnell’s often darkly comic narrative depicts families as snake-pits of subtle power plays, rich men as unbalanced, and social life as an awkward struggle to paper cheerful good manners over fear, resentment, and boredom. His prose is full of brilliantly evocative character sketches: “Oliver was silent at first. Rude. He flared his nostrils. He sat perfectly still and seemed to count something by means of the nostril-flarings….like a lizard, motionless except for its reptilian dewlap flexing. McConnell’s superb eye for detail reveals layered dramas in a single piercing glance: “One couple was almost lost in shadow in the back. The girl, in tears maybe, bent over her knees. She looked sickened by something her boyfriend had told her. The boy was torturing a matchbook, staring at it with clockmaker’s concentration and an air of contempt.” From a tangle of inappropriate, unpropitious relationships, McConnell unspools sharp-eyed psychological insights.
An entertaining, deeply imagined literary melodrama.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9798988282952
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Itna Press
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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