Despite occasional descents into melodrama, Pipe Dream is the work of a talented newcomer passionate about his material. An...
A staff writer for Philadelphia Weekly debuts with a searing tale of betrayals, self-betrayals, wasted lives—and addiction.
The place is Philadelphia, though the setting could be any big city. Everett Jackson (street name: Black), a young African-American awaiting trial for murder, tells the bulk of his story in one long flashback. Black’s a “piper”—a crack-cocaine addict—as is his best friend Leroy. That is, they would be best friends if the all-controlling need for the hit didn’t make romantic nonsense out of so humanly natural a concept. As usual, Black and Leroy are broke on this particular night. In order to score, they have to run some kind of scam, which, in its typical inefficiency, is what lands them in the wrong place at the wrong time—in a certain crack house where someone has just been murdered. It turns out to be a very important someone: the city councilman who heads the Police Civilian Review Board. He’s been lured to his death because a couple of highly placed cops need to discredit him before he can blow the whistle on the corruption that’s made them rich. The cops also need scapegoats, a role for which both Black and Leroy, friendless and powerless, seem tailor-made. An all-out manhunt ensues, leading the beset pipers to go underground. Expert at wriggling and squirming, they make it seem for a while as if they might escape—but they don’t, and they can’t. The thing about pipers is that way down deep they know they don’t deserve to. Violence leads to bloodshed and, paradoxically, to isolated patches of something like nobility. In the end, Black’s desperate battle against the system, and his own inner demons produces an unsought and affecting redemption.
Despite occasional descents into melodrama, Pipe Dream is the work of a talented newcomer passionate about his material. An impressive debut—and a writer to watch.Pub Date: July 31, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-75660-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
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
PERSPECTIVES
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