Boy meets girl, boy and girl take turns handcuffing each other to bed, boy and girl plot to kill girl's husband in this sex-soaked noir debut. Once Jimmy Rogers was the golden boy of Clarksville, Calif., getting into scrapes his father, the mayor, had to call in favors to pull him out of. Now, after his gilded youth has ended in a rash of failures and disappointments—the final blow his disinheritance by his father—Eve Stack, his boss's wife, is all the has-been insurance agent can think about, even when he's making love to somebody else. After a few months of marathon crank-and-couplings in Eve's discreet dungeon, Jimmy can't think of anything but hard sex and big money. It's the perfect time for him to resist the apple-cheeked allure of Kelly Owens, the new face at Phil Stack's agency, and agree to Eve's plan to dispose of her wealthy, inconvenient husband. Jimmy could never have predicted the horrific way the killing goes awry. But he certainly should've seen what would happen next, if not the exact steps in his path to perdition. Phil's brother Nigel turns up out of the blue and sinks serious teeth into both Jimmy and Eve, who's all too comfortable with being a new man's sex slave and confidential informer. Jimmy's got to get rid of Nigel too, of course, but not until he's finished jumping through every nasty hoop Nigel's forced on him. Harrington's distinctive spin on this familiar tale, apart from liberal doses of truly dangerous sex, is to allow Jimmy's civic connections—the D.A. and the sheriff are boyhood friends who know how to show respect to the mayor's legacy—to keep pulling him back from the edge of disaster, even as they keep reminding him that ``killing Phil had really been just one more misstep in a long line of missteps.'' The grisly, deadpan, unnervingly comic tone makes you wonder if Jim Thompson hasn't risen from the grave.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-13955-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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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