An entertaining but overstuffed send-up that sometimes bogs down in provocations.
Avant-garde scenesters subject a square billionaire to cultural readjustment in this raucous debut satire.
In despair, Larry Frommer and his buddy Hank, two down-on-their-luck performance artists in San Francisco’s seedy Tenderloin neighborhood, resort to jobs at soulless computer company SI, where they labor in a cubicle gulag and stage subversive pranks like overflowing the men’s room toilet. When that goes south, the duo mount their most audacious piece yet: abducting Bill Gates–ian software mogul Bill Kunstler and transforming him into a “performance art machine” in much the same way he has molded legions of programmers into workaholic nerds. Their improbable but entertainingly choreographed caper goes smoothly, and Bill, held naked and helpless in a filthy cage in Larry’s apartment, undergoes a sadistic makeover as he’s kept in darkness, subjected to deafening yoga records and brainwashed with theater jargon: “NOW EXPAND IT! ABSTRACT! MOVE YOUR BODY!” The reprogramming, depicted in bloody, scatological and rather disturbing detail, succeeds all too well, and Bill blossoms into a mystical performance savant who soon has Larry and Hank once again dancing to his tune. Larry and Hank’s picaresque adventures lampoon many deserving subcultures, from the scurvy geekdom of Silicon Valley to performance art itself, which comes off as a quagmire of turgid pretention and straw-grabbing sensationalism. “HARK! TARRY! I SUBORDINATE YOUR TEXTUAL DADDY IN MY TWO-FOLD SOLIPSISTIC VAT,” intones one artiste as she bites into a formaldehyde-preserved toad. Wichmann takes aim at these overripe targets with whip-smart prose and a fertile, scabrous comic imagination that feels a bit like a mashup of Rain Man (1988) and Fight Club (1999). Yet there doesn’t seem to be much effort put into shaping or pacing the narrative other than to pile on more craziness until the proceedings implode. As scenes of gross-out excess drag on, the novel starts to feel as exhausting as one of the haphazard performance pieces it parodies.
An entertaining but overstuffed send-up that sometimes bogs down in provocations.Pub Date: April 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9910257-0-1
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Freakshow Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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