Time-passing fluff of the most anemic kind.
Gossip! Scandal! Hollywood! A story about all these—yet none of them made exclamation-mark worthy.
De Vries is a veteran career scribbler who, for ten years, has covered the ups and downs of Hollywood for the glossies. She’s a new hand at fiction, however, and her first outing shows it. Her heroine, Alex Davidson, is a senior publicist at DWP, a Hollywood agency that specializes in handling former A-list celebrities fallen on hard times and trying to claw their way back into the spotlight. Alex’s newest acquisition is Troy Madden, a young actor with killer looks, a disarming Midwest attitude, and an insane drug habit (Brad Pitt by way of Robert Downey Jr.) that pretty much wrecked his career. Fresh out of rehab (but not so clean), he’s now Alex’s responsibility. Which is the last thing she needs, as DWP is about to be acquired by a bigger, meaner agency, and she’s not even sure she wants to be in publicity anymore—and that’s a pretty hard pill to get readers to swallow, since for every time Alex yearns to be a member of the East Coast intelligentsia or slams the brutal vacuousness of those in her chosen profession, she makes the very sort of sweepingly shallow generalization readers would expect from a Hollywood stereotype. Buoying Alex in her oh-so-horrid job (which seems to involve making phone calls, drinking lattes, and being nice to selfish movie stars) is the usual wisecracking gay assistant, a stock character swiftly becoming about as welcome as the token black friend in teen film or fiction. There’s the occasional biting observation to show that de Vries has put in real time in the Tinseltown trenches—“Peg is one of the female leviathans Hollywood secretly breeds. . . Tough as nails, most of them could run a small country and none of them are above fucking with you because they can”—but the credit she’s earned gets put to little good use.
Time-passing fluff of the most anemic kind.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6138-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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