Billed as a roman à clef, this first novel by the Kleier trio (who star in HGTV’s reality show Selling New York) seems more of a recitation of trendy brand names, trendy shops and restaurants and the trendy New York City residential real estate coveted by Big Apple movers-and-shakers.
The lightweight narrative chronicles the adventures of the Chase family, Elizabeth, the mother, and Kate and Isabel, daughters who work with their parents at Chase Residential, "a wildly successful boutique agency." The authors (mother and daughters) are real-life Manhattan residential brokers. They know multimillion-dollar locations, and they know people willing to bid above asking price for the view: "After irritating Elizabeth for months with his indecision and almost daily phone calls, the exasperating Bart Schneider finally opted to buy." They know co-op boards want to see financials and will demand dogs take the freight elevator. The Chases also recite every brand name coveted by those who earn seven figures, from Jimmy Choo to Badgley Mischka. The plot is minimal. Kate worries about an on-again/off-again relationship with a can't-find-himself boyfriend. Teddy Wingo, a womanizing, high-producing Chase broker, conspires to join a rival firm. Then there is Isabel's enigmatic client, Delphine, the trophy wife of a count, but any reader not bedazzled by Möet Chandon will decipher that mystery before the next power lunch at Balthazar. Much of the narrative moves via cell phones or chauffeur-driven Mercedes, or while shopping at Saks or Bergdorf or over a lunch of pollo patanato at Sette Mezzo. Countless names are dropped—everyone from Billy Joel to Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones—and doubt Page Six fans will be amused to see doppelgängers in cameo appearances.
Ungaro, Chanel, Nina Ricci, Poggenpohl and Sub-Zero do not great storytelling make.
Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-1127663
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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