by John Niven ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2009
The protagonist’s venomous rants have the power to amuse, but ultimately they become infantile and tedious.
While the title is not quite meant to be taken literally, it does express the cynicism at the core of this novel by Niven (Music from Big Pink, 2005) about the contemporary music industry.
At the maelstrom’s center is London A&R man Steven Stelfox, who desperately desires to cease being an occasionally successful minion and be made head of his recording company’s Artist and Repertoire division. Stelfox is one of the most narcissistic and hateful characters in recent memory: Lying is natural to him, and his overdeveloped sense of competition makes screwing friends and colleagues as easy as breathing—or perhaps a more apt simile would be as easy as snorting lines of coke, a habit he liberally indulges. Stelfox inhabits a subculture pervaded by drugs, sex (kinky and otherwise), inauthenticity and materialism. He not only revels in this world, he wants to come out on top. The obstacles to his goal are formidable. Chief among them are airily arrogant artists like Rage, who’s received a formidable advance from the studio to produce an album freakishly incapable of attaining commercial success. (Rage wants to release an hour-long cut as a single and refuses to allow the company any edits.) Stelfox finds himself reluctantly promoting a new girl band called Songbirds. His first impression? “Imagine you’d got four fishwives together, filled them full of Special Brew, and told them to scream random, primal abuse at each other.” (Eventually they transform from semi-literate East Enders to catty artistes.) Other roadblocks standing between Stelfox and his dreams are a stable of vicious studio executives prone to goofing off and goofing up. When one of his greatest professional rivals is imported as the new director of A&R, Stelfox has to become, if possible, even more loathsome, devious and deadly.
The protagonist’s venomous rants have the power to amuse, but ultimately they become infantile and tedious.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-169061-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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by John Niven
by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004
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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