A sometimes-insightful but flawed drama.
Joshua and Foley’s debut screenplay tells the story of how one man’s dark tendencies upend a Midwestern community.
Police Lt. Frank Murphy is used to covering up for his 24-year-old younger brother, Tom, a lovable screw-up. Tom is pursuing an MBA degree in Arizona, but he’s come home to Briarwood, Michigan, for a friend’s wedding. Soon, Frank has to pick up his drunk, naked, and unconscious brother from the house of Tom’s longtime friend Megan, who’s clearly rattled by something that Tom did, although she makes no formal complaint. The next morning, however, Tom claims he can’t remember what happened. “What time did I come here?” he asks Frank’s wife, Melissa, the next morning. “Frank? How did I end up with him?” At the wedding, Megan tells Tom to stay away from her, but she still doesn’t want to talk about what happened. Tom drinks heavily at the reception, joking with his friends and sneaking drinks to Katie, the 16-year-old sister of one of his friends. Later, after Tom is caught attempting to rape Katie in the bathroom, Frank tries to keep everyone from finding out. The event inspires Megan to confess to Melissa what happened the night before. The book concludes with a few sample storyboards by debut illustrator Miller, which will aid readers in imaging how a filmed version of the screenplay might look. Overall, the screenplay tackles the severity of sexual assault in an unflinching way, and it does a particularly good job of showing how quickly some men will try to laugh off or cover up terrible crimes of their peers: “Relax,” another cop tells Tom at one point. “As far as Megan goes, she wasn’t exactly sober herself.” A number of superfluous characters and exchanges prove distracting, however, and after Tom’s crimes are revealed, the plot assumes a melodramatic tone. The ending, especially, goes off the rails in a way that overshadows the central issue of the story.
A sometimes-insightful but flawed drama.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4809-8146-1
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Rosedog Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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