Think of a really, really good John O’Hara novel. Frank has delivered the goods.
The years of the Hollywood blacklist, in an ambitious first novel from the Pulitzer-winning critic and biographer (Louise Bogan, 1986).
The story focuses on three major characters. The former Dinah Milligan is an energetic not-quite-beauty who enters the fringes of the movie world working as a dancer, then radio writer. Dinah marries Jake Lasker, a successful screenwriter and director. Then both their lives are changed by contact with Dinah’s younger sister “Veevi” (Genevieve), a legendary screen goddess who—like Dinah herself—had briefly been a Communist Party member during WWII. Now it’s 1951, and Dinah, called to testify before a congressional committee, saves her husband’s career (and their comfortable lifestyle) by “naming names,” including that of Veevi, living in France with her younger second husband. Dinah is selectively snubbed and ostracized, Jake thrives, and Veevi, dumped for a younger beauty, returns to California. Reputedly a hero of the Resistance along with her late first husband, European director Stefan Ventura, Veevi is now “unemployable”—and her rapacious desire to survive is encapsulated in a remark made to the wayward Jake, comparing herself to Dinah: “She wants things. I want things.” Cheat and Charmer is beautifully imagined and plotted, deftly blending tinselly melodrama with astute commentary on politics, sex, and issues of personal ethics and responsibility. It’s filled with sharply etched supporting characters (among them: Goldwyn-like studio mogul Irv Engel and cosmopolitan mother-figure Dorshka Albrecht). But Frank excels most in rich, deep characterizations of her three principals: heartfelt Dinah, ever trying and failing to do what’s right; feline, unstable Veevi; and appetite-driven, faithless Jake, weighted by his own selfish needs (“If he ever had to go without other women, he would die”), a firm believer in his own flickering integrity.
Think of a really, really good John O’Hara novel. Frank has delivered the goods.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6091-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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