More than anyone needs to know about poker, but engaging prose and endearing characters bode well for Wener’s new career....
After a turn as a Brit pop star in the mid-’90s, Wener turned to writing fiction. Her US debut—about love, loss, and poker—is an impressive second act.
Audrey Unger is on the edge. She’s a die-hard urbanite living in London with an adoring gardener boyfriend who dreams of moving her to the countryside, a career as a math tutor and part-time bookkeeper, and fantasies of a sexual tryst with the pop star Bono (“a fantastic, filthy, sweaty, dirty shag, on a bed the size of a small Third World country”). Her true obsession, though, is her long-gone father, from whom she inherited her mathematical skills and fascination with scientific fact. When Dad gave up being a schoolteacher to turn professional poker player, with friends like “Jimmy Silk Socks,” Audrey’s mother left him for a sensible man named Frank. But then Audrey’s mother died, her father failed to show up at the funeral to rescue her, and Audrey has spiraled since then from math prodigy to shoplifter. Now 33, she’s clever, charming and “so fearful of things falling apart that I seek to destroy them before they have an opportunity to collapse beneath me.” She’s a lost soul until she meets the 400-pound, agoraphobic, obsessive-compulsive Louie Bloom, who sets her on a path of self-discovery. Louie is a busted-down American hustler who, in exchange for a window box with lavender, agrees to teach Audrey to play poker, a game he approaches with religious fervor (“For an instant you feel like you’re actually living in this world, instead of sitting on the edge of it waiting to die”). Hooked on the game, caught up in Louie’s schemes and ambitions, Audrey risks all on a trip to Vegas that could change her life and dig up her elusive father.
More than anyone needs to know about poker, but engaging prose and endearing characters bode well for Wener’s new career. (Wener’s first novel, Goodnight, Steve McQueen, will be published in early 2005 by Perennial.)Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-058547-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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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