Much like Preston Sturges’s Hail the Conquering Hero for the new century.
Not to be confused with the current spy thriller by R. Joseph Garber (p. 647). This Whirlwind from Jaffe (Skateaway, 1999, etc.) really is about meteorology, not spies.
In North Carolina’s Bentleyville, Lucas Prouty, a meteorology freak since childhood, works for the local TV station as weatherman, or beachfront weather journalist. But at 35 and at his fourth small TV station, he feels he should be working for a major market, not making bad jokes on air about his fellow nerds. Poor Lucas’s recent marriage, marred by the stillbirth of the couple’s only child, dissolved after 17 months. His wife couldn’t stand his obsessive habits, among them working his way through a dinner plate by food groups. He’s now single—and irons his boxer shorts. Will Lucas ever make out with Kiki, the strip-club bartender with lemon-colored hair, now working for her MA in social studies at the University of North Carolina? Well, yes, but not until something supremely fantastic happens to him, and that’s Isabel, a Category 5 hurricane, one of the three strongest storms to hit the US in the past century. The station goes nationwide as Lucas films from the beach, roofs lifting off, his cameraman suddenly cut in two, the top half sailing skyward as the nation watches Lucas himself swallowed up by Isabel. Famous, he’s found by rescue workers nine days later, buried in a restaurant’s cellar. Lucas and Bentleyville become the center of a media maelstrom. Whenever he turns on the hospital television, there the media is, gathered out front. Then the boss of a network offers him a contract in New York. Marvin Kellogg has him on his late-night TV show. He and Kiki make out, almost. All of this happens with Lucas half-dazed, if not stupefied. There’s a movie deal afloat. Hey, what a whirlwind.
Much like Preston Sturges’s Hail the Conquering Hero for the new century.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-393-05961-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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
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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