"Fitful glimpses" from the 1960s/'70s life of glamorous Inez Christian Victor—wife of Senator Harry Victor (a onetime Presidential aspirant), daughter of Honolulu colonial aristocracy, and supposed acquaintance of writer Joan Didion, who sprinkles this short, glossily disjointed novel with precious authorial warnings, asides, and false starts. ("I am resisting narrative here.") In a heavy, gimmicky style more suited to New Journalism than fiction, narrator Didion ("Call me the author") assembles vi. gnettes from—and mini-essays about—Inez's existence in the public eye: the "major cost" of such a life, we're repeatedly told, is "memory." Thus, Inez has "come to view most occasions as photo opportunities." She endures the pressures of political wifedom (including Harry's infidelities) with "passive detachment." Her teenage children are disasters, of course—piggy son Adlai and drug-addict daughter Jessie. And the only real emotional connections for Inez seem to be her encounters through the decades with steely Jack Lovett, an older man who's some sort of spy/diplomat/entrepreneur. ("They were equally evanescent, in some way emotionally invisible; unattached, wary to the point of opacity, and finally elusive. They seemed not to belong anywhere at all, except, oddly, together.") Then, as insistently foreshadowed throughout, 1975 melodrama triggers a change in this passive life: Inez's insane father kills her sister and an Hawaiian congressman; meanwhile, daughter Jessie disappears—determined to be a waitress in collapsing South Vietnam. So Inez, shaken, leaves insensitive Harry and his venal political-machine at last, running off to Kuala Lumpur with Jack—who manages to find Jessie in the midst of the Saigon evacuation. And finally, after Jack dies, Inez acquires a global social conscience (she "ceased to claim the American exemption"), devoting her life to working at Southeast Asian refugee camps. A dissection of false-fronted political lifestyles? An indictment of American ethnocentricity? Well, Didion hammers away at both those themes—producing a few very shrewd nasty/funny lines of dialogue but little more. Meanwhile, the characters remain lifeless objects of smug, essayistic scrutiny, kept at a far distance by all the narrative tricks (Didion-as-character, roman a clef inklings, etc.). Still, the surfaces here—full of observant detail and aggressive, ironic sophistication-are likely to satisfy much of Didion's readership. And if the book-world's hype machine can make a major novel out of Renata Adler's Pitch Dark, it can certainly do as much for this more accessible, more political, but quite similar arrival: a chic literary objet with a thin soap-opera center.
Pub Date: April 25, 1984
ISBN: 0679754857
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1984
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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