It's 34 years since The Carpetbaggers ignited Robbins's fame, but the familiar scandals, sex, and skulduggery in this late- breaking sequel have cooled to room temperature. Jonas Cord Jr., whose tumultuous relationship with his father ended lovelessly in The Carpetbaggers, by the 1950s has become the Jonas Cord—rich and powerful. Though he has an 18-year-old daughter, Jonas vows to tell his son (should he ever happen to have one) that he loves him. Surprise! Enter his bastard boy, whose mother, elegant wife of a Cuban statesman, Jonas had deflowered and then spurned when she was an ingenue. Jonas Enrique Raul Cord y Batista—Bart for short—is already a brilliant WW II vet-Harvard- grad-lawyer-polyglot-blond-hunk when he meets Dad, who is determined to add heir and businessman to Junior's list of credits. Bart begins to dip his toe into Jonas's dealings, and before you know it he's up to his neck in Mafia-entangled hotel casino deals, entertainment industry high jinks, and messy family politics. Bart discovers that, like his father, he has a taste for sex, money, power, and conflict. So the two go head to head in round after repetitive round of nervous parent vs. rebellious adolescent: Bart has affair with actress, Dad has affair with her competition; Bart launches loser TV variety show, Dad complains he's botching the job; Bart restructures company, Dad cries sabotage; Dad tells Bart to marry longtime classy girlfriend Toni Maxim, Bart says MYOB. Appearances by such real-lifers as Jack Kennedy (with whom Toni sleeps), Che Guevera, Jimmy Hoffa, Tallulah Bankhead, and Danny Kaye add some spice and historical context. Despite clashes in arenas like the corporate shark tank and the gnarled family tree, there is not much bracing conflict here. But generous doses of heavy breathing and heaving buttocks will likely provide solace for Robbins's stalwart fans. If only the plot were as impressively hung as the men.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-87289-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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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