A mordantly wry examination of one disgruntled man’s life.
A novel about the fragility of millennial masculinity.
Greathead’s novel chronicles the eponymous George’s life from childhood to early middle age. The book begins with George’s mother criticizing his father’s spending habits at 12-year-old George’s graduation from a drug-abuse-resistance program. George is aware of his father’s financial shortcomings as well as his mother’s contempt. While he watches Jackass with his sister, he can’t help but feel “implicated in his mother’s disgust with lowbrow contemporary culture, as though he were somehow responsible for it by being a member of the generation it was directed toward.” This disgust for lowbrow culture is also a disgust for performances of masculinity that are neither nice nor successful. When his father dies a few years later of a stroke, George is suspicious of people who exude naïveté or optimism. “Their cheery innocence,” he reflects, “was like an abrasive on a wound.” As George comes of age, he develops an on-again, off-again relationship with a woman named Jenny, who loves him openly, though he will not, at first, say it back. He exhibits outbursts of anger and is so critical of others that Jenny tells him, “Some people go through life trying to build others up….You like to poke holes.” Though George can be unlikable, he is self-aware. “George had been feeling like a loser recently,” Greathead writes toward the end, though he’s been behaving like one for some time. Ultimately, it’s unclear what George wants out of life or how he plans to succeed without leaning on his girlfriend, sister, or mother financially and emotionally. Greathead’s portrayal of an aggrieved white man struggling to find his place in the world is as much a portrait of an unsuccessful artist as a young man as it is a portrait of our times.
A mordantly wry examination of one disgruntled man’s life.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781250351029
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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