A master of high-concept fiction (Fashionably Late, 1994, etc.) returns with a likely bestseller about writing a bestseller— a meaty send-up of publishing told with intelligence, wit, and shameless enthusiasm. Goldsmith claims Rona Jaffe territory with the cross-cut stories of five writers whose novels appear on the fall list of Davis & Dash, a floundering Manhattan publishing house. Susan Baker Edmonds, 63, once a legal secretary in Cincinnati, has been a bestselling romance writer for decades. In an author tour from hell (42 cities in six weeks), she battles to boost her circulation. The Cinderella figure is Camilla Clapfish, 29, a poor-but-virtuous British tour guide who fights loneliness by writing a gentle book about middle-aged women on a bus trip through Italy. In upstate New York, meanwhile, Judith and Daniel Gross collaborate on a commercial venture about a mother who kills her children. Judith will write, Daniel will edit and sell. But Daniel gets greedy and claims sole authorship. The lone male author is Gerald Ochs Davis, Jr. (monogram GOD), the Michael Korda-esque publisher of Davis & Dash who supports three wives and a mistress with his bestsellers. Finally, there's Bloomington, Indiana, librarian Opal O'Neal, in town to sell the 1,114-page manuscript written by her daughter Terry, who, after her 27th rejection letter, hanged herself. Along with a ton of old gossip and dropped names (including ``the pricks at Kirkus''), Goldsmith melds her tale with a user's guide to publishing (``Now was not the time to think about Alf and his disloyalty, her daughter's wasted life. . . . Now only remember that half of all mass market paperbacks sold were romances—almost a billion dollars in annual sales''). Despite some lapses in dramatic tension, a bright and entertaining education in bookmaking where the good get bestsellers and the bad never eat in the Grill Room again. ($175,000 ad/promo; film rights to Paramount; author tour; radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-017822-1
Page Count: 528
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
PERSPECTIVES
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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