The fallout of America’s atomic nightmare in a touching, humanistic story.
A grimly fascinating tale set in New York City in summer 1975, when the daughter of a nuclear physicist faces—with the help of her four therapists—the psychological damage caused by her father’s early death.
After seven years of traveling the globe with little money and no intentions, 30-year-old Marea Hoffman returns to America to answer one nagging question: Was her father’s death by car accident when she was just 12 a suicide over his despair at working on the hydrogen bomb? Marea is rootless, possessing only what’s in her knapsack; she takes a “white room” in a transient hotel, gets a night job at Dawn’s Early Rising baking bread with a hippie gay baker, and spends her days riding the subway and paying visits to the four therapists she tries to please by presenting four distinct parts of herself. Marea (named for the seas on the dark side of the moon) has had nightmares about her father’s work since she was a child growing up with her parents in Princeton, where fellow scientist Albert Einstein used to come over for Sunday dinner. Marea’s father Jonas, an Austrian Jew who barely escaped the death camps, found his scientific work a way both to foil evil and help his adopted country. Yet his wife, Virginia, a Quaker, and Einstein, being pacifists, try vehemently to change his mind—with the result that Jonas is exiled from everyone’s good graces before his tragic early death in 1957. Former TV producer and second-novelist Wenner (Setting Fires, 2000) manages in a short space to create memorable characters in the four therapists (old world Dr. Angela Iris, uptight psychoanalyst Colin Ross, sexy Jungian Eric Silas, and politically defensive lesbian Nina Wolf) and in Marea’s sadly diminished mother, not to mention in Einstein himself, whom Marea called Grandpa and used to dance with around the living room to oompah music.
The fallout of America’s atomic nightmare in a touching, humanistic story.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5164-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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