Farewell tour of predatory American business practices by the late Robbins. This differs not a whit in spiritual vacancy from Robbins’s earlier works, except that now his sheer storytelling clout rises above dismal bad taste. Opening in the ’40s in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, the story circles back to the lower-middle-class settings of Robbins’s earliest novels, Never Love a Stranger and A Stone for Danny Fisher (which was set in ’40s Chicago), then goes on with a plot that reprises several of his sagas, with many familiar Robbins milieus crammed into one. When high-school senior Jerry Cooper (once Kupferman) is orphaned at 17, his Uncle Harry robs him blind, as does Jerry’s 19-year-old lover Kitty, who winds up marrying Uncle Harry while carrying Jerry’s child. Uncle Harry, a numbers man who owns a busy soda fountain, hires Jerry to pull sodas after school, which gets him into the carbonated water business (which Uncle Harry also steals from him). Come WWII, Jerry is shipped to France, where he works his way up to master sergeant repairing damaged Jeeps near Paris. He gets into selling them on the black market and also meets Jean Pierre Plescassier, whose family sells Plescassier water (read: Perrier). At war’s end, Jerry’s knowledge of carbonated water sales in New York leads Jean Pierre to hire him for the introduction of Plescassier water to the States. Then Jerry runs up against the Mafia—and, again, Uncle Harry, who has become a good business friend of Mafia boss Frank Costello. Pages drip with sex, and every story-starved cell gets fed. Goodbye, Harold, and may billions of new readers raise a joyful shout wherever you are.
Pub Date: May 19, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-85294-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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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