A follow-up to 1993's endearing Everything Looks Impressive, with a whiplash funny sprint through the merciless memory of the late-1980s overstuffed art scene. Kennedy's book might well have been titled Everything Looks Impressive, but Not for Long. Why? Because in the burgeoning career of recent Princeton grad Fred Layton, the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash is right around the corner. Not that Fred's new employer, unscrupulous art dealer and all-around nouveau riche reptile Nelson Albright, gives a hoot. This, after all, is a man who owes Sotheby's millions. Promised by Albright that he'll be a millionaire by the time he's 30, Fred settles into indentured servitude at Albright's Boston gallery, contending with the boss's tidal caprices, sidestepping the plots of a backstabbing fellow salesman, developing jaundiced art-world versions of collegiality and friendship, and struggling—peripherally—with his homosexuality. While wooing several major clients, including a former cocaine trafficker and a wealthy North Carolina society matron, Fred learns how to lie through his teeth, improvise art history, and pass off damaged prints as rare art. He even gets picked up by a luscious Texas antiques dealer, but he fails to muster the gumption to betray the supremely self-interested Albright. After the crash, Albright's already shaky finances undergo a full-fledged assault from a rival dealer, Oksana Outka, who raids her main competitor's clientele and schemes to have Albright exiled from the art world. Fred makes a hobby of rescuing Albright from the abyss, but the flamboyant gallerist's abusive, blowtorch personality leaves Fred dreaming of escape, and the action concludes with a memorable confrontation at a Sotheby's auction. Kennedy showcases a talent for deft plotting, wonderfully bitchy dialogue, and for savage caricature, memorably rendering the hypermoneyed as a pack of jackals mistaking the smell of dollars for good taste. A droll, madcap, witty, downright old-fashioned romp that mixes dynamite satire with featherweight tragedy. Kennedy was one to watch. Now he's one to wait for.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-47736-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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