Unlikable heroine, mean-spirited plot.
The author of, most recently, Best Enemies (2003), introduces the “bumbo.”
Melanie Banks is a successful financial planner living in Manhattan. When she married football hero Dan Swain, the two were perfectly matched, good-looking up-and-comers. Then he blew out his knee and turned into a “bumbo”: a slacker who sponges off his hard-working wife. By the time their divorce is final, Melanie is glad to be rid of him, but she’s not so glad about the alimony she’ll be paying for years to come. When Melanie realizes that the payments stop if Dan cohabits with another woman for 90 days, she hires a matchmaker to lure her ex into new love. The plan succeeds a little too well. Not only does Dan fall head-over-heels for a gorgeous veterinarian, but this dream girl also inspires him to take a shower, put on a suit and find a job coaching football. Meeting the new-and-improved Dan, Melanie wants him back. Any woman who has dumped a loser only to see him become another woman’s Prince Charming will feel a twinge of pathos here, but such sympathy will last only until she remembers that Melanie is the diabolical creator of this sorry situation. She engineered Dan’s transformative romance with Machiavellian determination and, in the process, manipulated and lied to several people—including Dan. Melanie tries to explain why her love of lucre supercedes ethics or decency (her mother died when she was small; her father was a poor provider; she equates money with security), but this isn’t enough to make her appealing. Heller may hope that the phenomenon of well-paid women supporting their less-successful exes will become talk-show fodder—indeed, the prologue features Melanie protesting that there really are a lot of women just like her—but Heller’s story this time out doesn’t succeed as entertainment.
Unlikable heroine, mean-spirited plot.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-059925-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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