A mildly entertaining but superficial treatment of this outsized writer.
The famous writer proves an elusive quarry in Malmont’s second (The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, 2006), a meandering fact/fiction hybrid about London’s last year of life.
At first the focus is on the far less well-known Hobart Bosworth, star of silent films and a studio owner, who’s made several movies out of London’s novels. Once Hobart and Jack were kindred spirits, but now, in 1915, Jack has ostracized the director after a squabble over money. So Hobart is a man on a mission: to patch things up, have Jack write an original screenplay and save his studio. He travels to Jack’s ranch in Northern California only to find his new house burnt to the ground (arson is suspected). The writer has moved on to Paradise, his name for Hawaii, and Hobart follows him. So far so good, but here the focus becomes diffuse as the viewpoint switches to Charmian, Jack’s second wife, protective and passionate. We meet Jack returning from surfing with a group of Hawaiian beach bums. It’s unlike Jack, who’s racked by pain (kidney problems). There, Jack the showman can’t resist staging an oceanfront boxing match with Hobart, a hokey scene which ends with the men reconciling in the surf, a warm-up for Jack’s spectacular, life-threatening jump from a high rock. As he explains to his confidant, Professor Homer, whose expertise is Hawaiian mythology, his head was full of Hawaiian history and Norse legends. Jack’s talks with the Professor, the heart of the novel, fail to shed much light on the writer’s tortured psyche; it’s his stunts that are memorable. For the rest, Malmont gives us colorful episodes (a psychedelic trip that Jack and Charmian take is pure ’60s) and bed-hopping between the principals. Teasingly, Jack writes that screenplay for Hobart but then burns it.
A mildly entertaining but superficial treatment of this outsized writer.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4722-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
