The proportions may be wrong, but there’s something here for everyone: An affectionate peek at the workers clinging to...
Best friends since sixth grade and now they’re hitting sixty, these two foxy Hollywood working girls. Their friendship is the heart of McMurtry’s larky latest, fizzy enough to keep the fans happy.
Sunday morning in Hollywood. Maggie Clary is alone in her bungalow, her lifelong home, when all three of her married daughters show up unannounced. They’re on a mission to ease Maggie’s “despair” following her hysterectomy. She still has her job as manager of a loop group, shepherding her volatile, druggy crew into the mix studios in the unglamorous world of post-production; and she still has a sex life, or did until she dumped the handsome young actor she caught going through her purse. Yet somehow the spark has gone. Might a trip with her old friend Connie revive it? This is an excellent setup, its tone raunchy in a cheerful, nonchalant way, as befits two sexual adventurers (not matrons, insists Connie) who’ve been “trolling for good-looking guys” since their early teens. And they don’t have to be young studs (Maggie realizes she may be falling in love with her ancient Sicilian shrink, despite his S&M games). Once the ladies are on the road, driving to the Texas panhandle to visit Maggie’s last living aunt, the writing goes thin. A white-bearded hitchhiker (a wrangler in Rita Hayworth’s last movie) and a diminutive Indian who murdered his wife are colorful, but in an ersatz way. Aunt Cooney turns out to be a ruthless old crone overseeing her agribusiness (two million hens), and Maggie and Connie beat a hasty retreat back to LA. A short final section feels overly rushed, making Maggie’s closing affirmation of her friendship with Connie less moving than it might have been.
The proportions may be wrong, but there’s something here for everyone: An affectionate peek at the workers clinging to Hollywood’s lowest rung; campy sex; drama on the highway; and canny insights into the dynamics of family and friendship.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5079-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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