As the characters blunder about, the narrator is perfectly on his game.
Another chronicle of modern disappointments and their occasional consolations from a master of the modern social novel.
There are four main characters in McCauley's latest: Cecily, an academic embroiled in an investigation at her university; Tom, her gay architect uncle, also facing career trouble; Dorothy, Cecily's ditsy mom; and the town of Woodstock, in which Dorothy is about to open a retreat center with a self-help author, a rather horrible person, natch. McCauley's descriptive gifts shine in his evocations of Woodstock, where "almost every storefront along the main street was decorated with wind chimes, prayer flags, colorful pennants, or loose, billowing clothes for sale" and "in the middle of the tiny town green…was a drum circle and a group of gray-haired people in unstructured cotton pants doing what looked like interpretive dance." His story, in which Cecily and Tom make a pilgrimage to the opening of Dorothy's "more intimate, more affordable Omega Institute” and which revolves, per his usual, around secrets in the characters' lives, gives him plenty of opportunities to do what he does best, which is make pronouncements. "No one can do 'whatever they want to do,' and probably no one should," he plangently informs us. "When someone starts by telling you you can do 'whatever you want,' they end up forcing you to do what they tell you." That seems reasonable, but the author also delights in less defensible assertions. "Academia was the one institution it was always safe to insult, no matter what the political persuasion of the person you were talking to. Like capers, it was universally disliked." The emotional heart of the story is the profound devotion Tom feels for his niece, which at the opening of the book has caused his longtime partner to throw up his hands and move out. Even if we never quite believe this, and even if some other plotlines are also a little hokey, you don't have to care much about plot to enjoy a McCauley novel.
As the characters blunder about, the narrator is perfectly on his game.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781250296795
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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