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
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
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
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