His own career very much a creation of 80's hype, McInerney here attempts an unironic post-mortem on the era of leveraged buyouts and consumer excess. Not surprisingly, it reads like an apologia pro vita sua, without any of the bite or wit of Bright Lights, Big City. Publishing insiders will no doubt find much of interest in the roman Ö clef aspects of this overwrought saga. Otherwise, it's a pretentious morality tale with all the depth and subtlety of Oliver Stone's Wall Street. ( Both Stone and McInerney thank businessman Ken Lipper for his insider's expertise.) The golden couple at the center of things are Corrine and Russell Calloway, handsome college sweethearts, whose cozy domesticity is envied by their swinging single friends. Though she's a stockbroker, Corrine also works in a soup kitchen and has a ``Mother Teresa syndrome,'' according to her husband. He's a Wunderkind editor at a distinguished publishing house but feels his career is being stymied by his mentor, Harold Stone, ``a former radical intellectual'' who now spends his lunch hour at the Four Seasons. Together with a street-smart, young black editor, Russell and an investment-banker friend plan a hostile takeover of his employer. They enlist the help of Bernie Melman, a short and pudgy corporate raider who eventually sells Russell down the river. So much for the intrigue. McInerney fills out his melodrama with hunks of undigested business chat; a textbook's worth of college-level literary quotations; and pathetic running jokes about exploding breast implants. The personal lives of the key players suffer from predictable problems: infidelity, alcoholism, anorexia, satyriasis, drug addiction, and depression. With all its soap-opera turns, it's hard to take this thirtysomethingish novel seriously. Despite its purple patches, McInerney's latest is more Krantz than Fitzgerald. And he can probably take that to the bank, no matter how much it wounds his literary credit.
Pub Date: June 8, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-40219-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
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
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