It's certainly possible to write a hilarious novel about a bad comic, but Warner never breaks through the smug sensibility...
The sardonic tale of a hapless comic who rockets to fame with an idiotic gimmick only to find his life in worse turmoil—especially after emptying a gun into a guy on the street, for reasons left unexplained until the end.
Warner, a writer-editor associated with McSweeney's, makes his fiction debut with a novel about a character referred to only as the funny man—not the Funny Man, but the lower-case kind. The funny man's shtick is to deliver impressions and one-liners with his fist shoved deep into his mouth. His ticket to greater fame is a movie so awful—a bunch of hand-in-throat outtakes—that audiences mistake it for something brilliant. The funny man loves all the money and celebrity and limo sex, but it doesn't make him any less pathetic. His wife leaves him when a publicity-seeking actress claims she had sex with him during filming, comes back after he falsely fesses up and then leaves him again when he insists on the truth. His lawyer's genius strategy to plead him not guilty by reason of celebrity is a non-starter. And then there's the obligatory blow to the crotch the funny man suffers, in a batting cage. Redemption comes, sort of, in the form of the one-time tennis star he has been smitten with since detecting she was beaming him private messages in her TV ads. Much of the book seems beamed from the past as well. Warner's cultural commentary is passé when not obvious, and in going after a George Saunders–type absurdism, he isn't especially funny or clever (the protagonist's fondness for Kick in the A$$, a reality show he invents on which volunteers get booted in the rear for money, is indistinguishable from Warner's). Warner also should note that no comic would use "You dirty rat," the most famous line James Cagney never actually uttered, in a Bogie impersonation.
It's certainly possible to write a hilarious novel about a bad comic, but Warner never breaks through the smug sensibility of his debut to transcend his subject.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56947-973-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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