Little evocative description, even less character development: this time out, Coupland settles for improbable adventures...
A thin, occasionally maudlin poke at the pharmaceutical industry.
The Zeitgeist-defining novelist who tagged his rudderless contemporaries Generation X (1991) is now 40 but still feels his characters' pain. Here, plucky 67-year-old matriarch Janet presides over the discombobulated Drummond clan—two freaky sons, one square daughter, numerous dotty spouses, and a mean ex-husband—as it gathers in sweltering midsummer Orlando for the launch of a NASA shuttle carrying Sarah Drummond-Fournier. The much-admired astronaut was a born with one hand, thanks to the thalidomide her mother took during pregnancy, and the ironies roll on as Internet-savvy Janet reveals she is taking the drug again for mouth ulcers caused by AIDS. How did she get the dread disease? A bullet meant for seropositive son Wade (shot by his enraged, drunken father Ted) penetrated her body after passing through Wade’s. Meanwhile, as Coupland continues to pile on the action, much of it slapstick, Wade, equally clueless brother Bryan, and dipsomaniac Ted—all in need of some quick cash— descend on Disney World to meet up with one of Wade's lowlife buddies. He enlists them as couriers of a letter stolen from Princess Diana's coffin that they’re to deliver to Florian, the Swiss head of Buckingham Pest Control in the Bahamas. Florian also runs one of the world's biggest pharmaceutical firms, and after dinner with Janet, who carries a pillbox “the size of a sewing kit,” he cures her by clasping her bleeding hand to that of an immune Ugandan prostitute stolen from the Centers for Disease Control. The author just wants everyone to get along, but his sympathies evidently lie with 42-year-old loser Wade, pregnant women, and Janet. With this “pure and crud-proof” mom at the helm, he suggests, even the ill-starred Drummonds are not without hope.
Little evocative description, even less character development: this time out, Coupland settles for improbable adventures inspired by middle-of-the-night channel surfing.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2001
ISBN: 1-58234-165-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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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