Which industry’s next? Ghostwriting?
Robbins’s fifth postmortal work again alternates splendid pulp with thudding prose.
Each Robbins epic features a new venue for bottomless greed. Sin City (2002) took us behind the scenes at Vegas, Never Enough into the secrets of Wall Street and illegal trading, and The Secret into Victoria’s Secret with its nose deep into thongs and Brazilian wax jobs. The mistitled Heat of Passion (it should be Cold Passion) has its stunningly well-written passages (for a Robbins novel) about the secrets of the diamond industry, quite haunting passages of research afloat on a steaming sea of sex, all of it blood-pounding, pelvic, and vulgar. It’s breakfast with a Cartier or Harry Winston catalogue while gobbling a stack of buttery sugared cinnamon toast. Win Liberte was born in a taxicab on the afternoon Kennedy died. His gem of a mother dies when he’s young, and he’s raised by his grandfather and father, who buy rough diamonds wholesale on 47th Street and sell them as cut stones. Dad remarries, and Win now has an older stepbrother, Leo, who delights in evaluating diamonds while Win cares nothing for the industry. When Dad dies, Win inherits a business handled for him by his uncle and stepbrother while hormonal Win devotes himself to boats and “clits.” But when Uncle loses the company funds and Leo rips him off, Win is left penniless, with all his property under lien—except for a diamond mine in Angola that no one will buy because of the Angolans’ endless civil strife. Win heads for the mine, makes a go of it against vastly bloody odds, then finds himself facing the worldwide De Beers monopoly. “Harold’s” grossest scene is hard to choose, though a standout is Win’s pronging the 18-year-old daughter of his former lover when the mother, who’d once tried to kill him, walks in and wraps her cold fingers around his tool: “My blood ignited and I felt the lead rising in my pencil.”
Which industry’s next? Ghostwriting?Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30002-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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