An observant comedy with a dose of heart.
In this novel, a California screenwriter attempts to turn his life into a romantic comedy.
Five years after his divorce and deep into middle age, Nate Evans is standing among the wreckage of his former life. Literally. The Air Force just accidentally bombed his trailer—which sat on a grassy hill overlooking Santa Barbara and the Pacific Ocean—to smithereens. With his best years behind him, the washed-up Hollywood screenwriter wishes he could have a do-over, just like in the movies. To go back to high school when life made sense and he had the affection of sweet Julie Cooper: “If he only wished for it hard enough, he might transport himself back in time. Raw desire with a tremendous imagination was a powerful thing.” Very powerful, in fact. Nate soon finds himself living back at his parents’ house and taking a temporary position at his old high school, Mt. Hamilton in San Jose, where that same Julie Cooper (now a widow and grandmother) is the assistant principal. Even after all these years, Nate detects a spark still flickering between them. With everything in place, he decides to literally relive his high school experience, using his abilities as a screenwriter to compose his plans beforehand and put them into action. Can he fix his mistakes from the first time, opening up a new future for himself in the process? (“Maybe he would get an honest-to-God usable script from it, send it to his agent or anyone else who might be interested in something like Grumpy Old Men meets Back to the Future—minus the Delorean time-travel hot rod. Well, maybe not.”) Will a bit of Hollywood-style drama liven things up, or is he setting himself up for an even grander failure than before? Brill’s (The Patterer, 2013, etc.) prose is punchy and packed with colorful imagery that communicates the angst and literary inclinations of his protagonist: “The sun lingered over the Pacific’s horizon like a rubbernecking tourist trying to get one last look at the horrific scene of an accident.” The California setting is well-drawn, and Nate’s history as a screenwriter allows him to reflexively leap to movie references without taking readers out of the narrative. In his pursuit of drugs, sex, and his lost youth, Nate exhibits quite a bit of off-putting immaturity, but that’s kind of the point. He’s balanced out by the character of Julie, who, having survived a more traditionally challenging (i.e., adult) experience, is more relatable in her desire to revisit an earlier point in her life. Brill has managed to craft a satire that both skewers and celebrates the often myopic nostalgia of baby boomers and their attempts to replicate the thrills of their youth. Younger readers may roll their eyes at some of the humor, but the author’s target audience will likely find a great deal to laugh and cry over in this accessibly shrewd portrait.
An observant comedy with a dose of heart.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9960834-1-6
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Black Tie Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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