An action-packed but uneven comic romp.
In this novel, a man named Glenn Beck encounters plenty of trouble (any resemblance between the protagonist and the former Fox News commentator is most likely not a coincidence).
“There are a lot of Glenn Becks in the phone book,” the author writes. “This is one of ’em.” This Glenn Beck engages a whore. Is thrown in prison. Gets kidnapped. Twice. Repeatedly soils himself. One through-line holds the tale together: McGrouchpants clearly disdains Beck and takes palpable delight in dropping him into humiliating scenarios. The novel’s subtitle is somewhat misleading. There is no mystery to solve; at some points in the story, the author writes: “Glenn Beck thought, ‘It’s like I’m a detective.’ ” While McGrouchpants declines to offer a mystery, he seems well read. He dedicates the 2016 book to “sanity preservers” Alain Robbe-Grillet, Joan Didion, and William S. Burroughs. He kicks off the novel with quotes by the likes of Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Pauline Kael. But the work’s subtitle and the author’s pseudonym are an indication of the level of wit. The tale’s second sentence (“The whore was not the one he ordered”) sets the scabrous tone. The bulk of the 200 chapters are one to two sentences. For example: The 45-word Chapter One Hundred Eighty-Three ends with “Something had to give.” The next chapter opens with “Like: Glenn Beck’s bladder.” Along the way, the author delivers some amusing lines and colorful details. And readers who dislike Beck (and Fox News) will likely enjoy the story. But too often McGrouchpants seems to be of the opinion that the mere mention of Beck’s name in a compromising or scatological context is hilarious. Fans of Mel Brooks’ 1968 comedy The Producers may remember the humorous reaction shots of outraged Broadway patrons to the spectacle of Springtime for Hitler. Those will doubtless be the looks on some readers’ faces as they tear through this tale. In comedy, timing is everything, which raises the question: Why would readers in 2020 be interested in a book ridiculing Beck? Beck’s public profile and cultural standing have waned considerably since his Fox glory days when his signature blackboard and onscreen crying jags were brilliantly skewered by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Unfortunately, this novel feels a bit too much and too late.
An action-packed but uneven comic romp.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5323-1592-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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