Distinguished by an engaging voice, but the action doesn’t quite come to a head, and the serious parts aren’t as deft as the...
A vividly drawn, good-humored, yet ultimately unsurprising coming-of-age tale set in small-town Georgia.
Sumner (Polite Society, 1995) has an appealing narrator in Louise Peppers, a wild southern girl with a penchant for vanilla extract and other strong liquors. In a short preface, Louise explains that the story will end with her “in the Wapanog County Jail on the night after I was supposed to marry Zane Wilder”; she then circles back to fill in the gaps between that moment and her childhood. Seven-year-old Louise belongs to a middle-class family in decidedly working-class Counterpoint, Georgia. Her successful but overly cautious father Henry keeps telling her, “Remember who you are. You are a Peppers”; her mother Florida loves Jesus more than she does anyone; and her brother Roderick is severely asthmatic. In their world, “God is white, upper-middle-class, and Southern Baptist,” and eccentricity is the rule. But after Roderick’s sudden death, the story swerves into darker regions. Henry buries his head in his job as the general manager of a corrugated-board plant; Florida turns even more intensely to Jesus; and Louise sails into adolescence stuffing herself with Oreos and alcohol. Her teenage years make for a bumpy ride. She takes a job at her father’s plant and gets her sexual initiation from T.C. Curtis, a coarse Monte Carlo–driving lug. Eventually she runs away and joins a traveling carnival, where she hangs out with freaks, pursues her dream of becoming a clown, and hooks up with the aforementioned Zane Wilder, a carnie who swallows fire. The story’s main appeal lies in its eccentric cast: the morbid grandparents, the wacky mother, the lewd carnies. And Louise’s narration sounds like a southern-grotesque parody of Jane Eyre, replacing “Reader, I married him” with “All events fall short of their anticipation; my wedding was no exception.”
Distinguished by an engaging voice, but the action doesn’t quite come to a head, and the serious parts aren’t as deft as the comedy.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2001
ISBN: 1-56512-286-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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
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