A rollicking debut about a cola marketing campaign that takes on Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and corporate America in one perfectly executed triple play. Although publicity and marketing are popularly associated with the advertising mavens of New York, those in the know understand them as peculiarly West Coast enterprises—and our narrator Scat is nothing if not in the know. “Marketing is like LA,” he explains. “It’s like a gorgeous, brainless, model in LA. A gorgeous, brainless model on cocaine having sex drinking Perrier in LA.” In other words: Image beats reality every time. Scat (nÇ Michael George Holloway) has a well-developed taste for sharkmeat, but even he finds himself continually brought up short by the venalities of the trade. Desperate to get a foot in some door or other, he asks his old classmate Sneaky Pete for an introduction to the New Products Manager at Coca-Cola—an old friend of Sneaky Pete’s named 6. 6 [sic] can only spare 30 seconds of face time with Scat, but that’s enough for him to pitch his idea: “New cola product. Black can. Called Fukk” [sic]. 6 falls madly in love with the concept—and Scat falls madly in love with 6 (despite her ice-cold exterior and her self-proclaimed lesbianism)—and the two get right down to the business of throwing together a presentation. Fukk Cola becomes very hot, very quickly, so much so that the idea is stolen even before it’s pitched to the Coca-Cola brass, with the result that 6 loses her job and Scat loses his rights to the concept before it’s a week old. But neither is the sort to say die, and they team up once more to create the most expensive commercial advertisement ever made: a $140-million feature film about Coca-Cola starring Tom Cruise and Gwyneth Paltrow. Can two twentysomething has-beens turn defeat into failure? Can they at least find true love? This is Hollywood, after all. A bit too slick, but funny and fast all the same: about as filling as cotton candy, but just as sweet going down.
Pub Date: July 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-88640-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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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