Nice Mary Alice Baker gets involved with all sorts of nasty terrorists in this Saturday-matinee serial for the '90s. One day, Mary Alice is a normal California girl—abusive father, dead-end job snapping photos of tiny tots at Hansel and Gretel, shiftless boyfriend named Wrex with the same Doc Martens, leather jacket, and tattoos as everybody else's boyfriend. Then Wrex asks her to run an errand at the Los Angeles Airport—to swap a package he's got for another that's coming in at noon. Mary Alice has the requisite misgivings, but Wrex will go as high as $200 for the favor, and ``the more I drank, the safer the whole idea sounded.'' So Mary Alice agrees to make the swap, except a few things go wrong, and bang! the package blows up while she's still in LAX, sending her into hiding from (1) the local (and not-so-local) authorities; (2) Mike Fleischer, the mysterious buyer who never liked amateur couriers to start with and is sure this one has double-crossed him; (3) Frick and Frack, Fleischer's bullyboys, whose good terrorist/bad terrorist routine reminds Mary Alice of nobody so much as her father; and, for all she knows, (4) from the rotten apple among the bevy of exciting new friends she's met since transforming herself into pop-art photographer Nina Zero. There's demented filmmaker Cass, her randy painter friend Billy b, colorful Santa Monica gallery owner Bobby Easter, and a pair of private eyes named Ben and Jerry. All this sounds a lot more fun than it is, because the cheerfully crazy characters Mary Alice—sorry: Nina—meets aren't all that different from one another, the terrorist plot is familiar and featherweight, and Mary Alice's self-styled ``Confession of an Accidental Terrorist'' lacks a style as flagrantly goofy as the events it retails, probably because even as Nina Zero, Mary Alice remains invincibly nice. Eversz (False Profit, 1990, etc.) whips up a candy-colored terrorist parfait in which the copious blood might as well be strawberry sauce.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8021-1582-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
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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