Blistering pace weds us to these stereotyped characters for the duration.
Catholic woman chooses homicide over divorce, in a fourth thriller by Sloan (Act of God, 2002, etc.).
In 1955, Valerie O’Connor is a naïve Irish-Catholic girl from a large Vermont household where the punishment, while sometimes corporal, is never unjust, at least in her brainwashed view. Despite her father’s misgivings, she marries Jack Marsh, a Korean War vet with a future in airline mechanics. Jack’s mother died giving birth to him, and his alcoholic father battered a succession of nameless (to Jack) women. Thus Jack won’t want children (though he’ll get them), and women will be interchangeable. The oblivious Valerie suffers through it all. Jack rapes her on their honeymoon, misinterprets her feeble objections, and lashes out each time she announces a pregnancy, twice endangering the fetus. Still, the faith of her fathers won’t permit Val to leave Jack, use birth control, or rat him out over those cracked ribs and life-threatening tumbles. Decades wear on, Jack’s career advances, and his outside women proliferate. The family moves from Seattle to a hamlet south of San Francisco, where Valerie makes friends and gets a waitress job she adores. Jack’s abuse is sporadic, usually due to bourbon-fueled rage at being dumped by yet another mistress turned off by his technique. When his brutishness causes the death of one of his and Valerie’s children, the others plot their escape—and Valerie spends the’70s in a sedative fog, nipping at the bourbon herself. Two sons and a daughter walk the wild side, and another becomes a nun. Youngest son Ricky goes into Witness Protection, leaving Valerie with a grandson to raise—and a second chance. By now, the Marshes are in their 60s, and Val has a successful wedding couture business. Just when some hard-won tranquility settles on their abode, another scourge looms: retirement. The idled Jack returns to bourbon and gets what’s coming to him, about 400 pages too late.
Blistering pace weds us to these stereotyped characters for the duration.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2004
ISBN: 0-446-53029-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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