Even the zingers have less zing than in Frank’s first two send-ups (Bad Publicity, 2004, etc.) in this hit-and-miss snapshot...
Washington, 2000–2001: Beltway socialites fiddle while D.C. burns in Frank’s third satiric soufflé.
By the spring of 2000, everyone’s sick of Bill Clinton because everyone’s heard every possible joke about semen-stained dresses. Nonpareil hostess Trudy Hopedale (née Weinstein, as her catty, delusional mother-in-law keeps reminding her and everyone else in earshot) is more than ready for a change, even if that involves transferring her decorous carnal interests from her husband Roger, a Foreign Service veteran with a promising future behind him, to wheezing Midwestern Republican Senator Ricardo Willingham. Trudy’s sedate husband has turned from soft-hitting analyses of the paradox of American hegemony to a softcore novel, Desks of Power, which embarrasses everyone who reads it and may end up embarrassing more highly placed politicians as well. Though he isn’t ready to respond to rapacious Washington Post reporter Jennifer Pouch’s forthright pass, Trudy’s dear, dear friend and co-narrator Donald Frizzé is ready for a change of his own—perhaps a switch from his current project, a biography of Garret Augustus Hobart, William McKinley’s vice president, to a volume on some equally pivotal vice president. Change comes to town as the Clintons depart and the Bushes arrive. But as the country lurches toward war with “some international foe (I didn’t quite get the foe’s name),” these genteel nincompoops chatter only of shark attacks, the sleazy congressman whose intern has vanished and their own endlessly fascinating sexual adventures and social snubs. The myopia of “ordinary people like me who find themselves in the vortex of history and destiny” is a wonderfully promising subject, but these self-perpetuating aristocrats, who can rarely muster enough sincerity even to equivocate, are such easy targets that the satire comes off as alternately too broad and just plain irrelevant.
Even the zingers have less zing than in Frank’s first two send-ups (Bad Publicity, 2004, etc.) in this hit-and-miss snapshot of the way we live now.Pub Date: July 17, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4924-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
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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