With a lighter touch Rosenblatt might have produced a successful wry comedy.
A businessman almost destroys a liberal-arts college in this scattershot satire from essayist/commentator Rosenblatt (Lapham Rising, 2006, etc.).
Ancient, prestigious Beet College, north of Boston, was founded by a pig farmer. The hog motif is ubiquitous, so it’s fitting that the chairman of the board of trustees, Joel Bollovate, the mighty real-estate developer, is quite a pig himself. Bollovate is threatening to close the college; the $265 million endowment has been spent. He has issued an ultimatum. Unless the faculty can come up with a new curriculum that will bring in big bucks fast, it’s doomsday. Young Professor Peace Porterfield is chosen to chair the CCR (committee on curriculum reform). Idealistic and unworldly, Peace is a hero in the Frank Capra/Jimmy Stewart mold. He believes the heart of a university is teaching and learning, not committees, but he accepts the challenge, though his colleagues are a bunch of craven PC buffoons, and the CCR meetings go nowhere. Aside from the cartoonish villain Bollovate, Rosenblatt reserves his most withering scorn for the faculty, but he also jabs at a handful of disruptive students bent on nihilistic indolence. Their leader is a transfer student, a Southern belle desperate to conceal her past, who is being courted unsuccessfully by a faux Arab, Akim Ben Laden, actually a Jewish kid rebelling against his despotic father, a rabbi. The students’ antics, which include the occupation of two buildings, fill up the hole where a plot should have been, but the humor falls flat. In welcome contrast is a straightforward description of Peace teaching a poetry class; Rosenblatt celebrates beautifully the joy of the classroom before returning to more antics. Akim, in his off-campus cave, makes an amazing online discovery about Bollovate that ends the story.
With a lighter touch Rosenblatt might have produced a successful wry comedy.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-134427-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
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
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose...
Sparks (The Longest Ride, 2013, etc.) serves up another heaping helping of sentimental Southern bodice-rippage.
Gone are the blondes of yore, but otherwise the Sparks-ian formula is the same: a decent fellow from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches falls in love with a decent girl from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches—and is still suffering the consequences. The guy is innately intelligent but too quick to throw a punch, the girl beautiful and scary smart. If you hold a fatalistic worldview, then you’ll know that a love between them can end only in tears. If you hold a Sparks-ian one, then true love will prevail, though not without a fight. Voilà: plug in the character names, and off the story goes. In this case, Colin Hancock is the misunderstood lad who’s decided to reform his hard-knuckle ways but just can’t keep himself from connecting fist to face from time to time. Maria Sanchez is the dedicated lawyer in harm’s way—and not just because her boss is a masher. Simple enough. All Colin has to do is punch the partner’s lights out: “The sexual harassment was bad enough, but Ken was a bully as well, and Colin knew from his own experience that people like that didn’t stop abusing their power unless someone made them. Or put the fear of God into them.” No? No, because bound up in Maria’s story, wrinkled with the doings of an equally comely sister, there’s a stalker and a closet full of skeletons. Add Colin’s back story, and there’s a perfect couple in need of constant therapy, as well as a menacing cop. Get Colin and Maria to smooching, and the plot thickens as the storylines entangle. Forget about love—can they survive the evil that awaits them out in the kudzu-choked woods?
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose corn syrup, stickily sweet but irresistible.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2061-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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