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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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