Outlandish and frequently hilarious.
An unlikely premise—a polar bear makes it big in Los Angeles and then crashes—but somehow Cooper (Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes, 2006, etc.) makes it work.
The book is categorized as a graphic novel, but it’s more of a novella with illustrations. Beaufort the polar bear lives at the Beaufort Sea and is separated from his mother when an ice floe breaks off due to global warming. Attracted to the glitz and glitter of Los Angeles, he hitches down to southern California and nabs a job waiting tables at the trendy restaurant Nobu. There he’s discovered by Leonardo DiCaprio and offered the role of Leo’s sidekick in the film Separation of Oil and State. The reviews are sensational, and Beaufort rides the wave of celebrity and its over-the-top lifestyle. He hooks up with supermodel Svava and starts turning down plum roles—like the polar bear in The Golden Compass 2: The Return of Whimsy—because he doesn’t want to be typecast. (To his chagrin, the role eventually goes to Bigfoot.) Beaufort starts hangin’ out with the likes of Demi and Ashton and hits the party circuit hard. His creative juices start to flow, and his ego expands, when he decides that what he really wants to do is write and direct, so he starts crafting a screenplay called Bear, a movie about the war in Iraq starring Shia LaBeouf as a Marine from Alaska “who gets called out by his bunkmates when they discover he secretly sleeps with a stuffed bear that he also totes in his pack throughout their deployment.” Unfortunately, the movie bombs, and Beaufort becomes a pariah in Tinseltown—after all, you’re only as good as your last film. In his depression and search for meaning, Beaufort turns to Scientology. Although he has a few commercial auditions—including one for Klondike Frozen Novelties—Beaufort feels his life spinning out of control, but he pulls himself together, enters a 12-step program for alcoholism and addiction and writes a one-bear show that becomes an off-Broadway hit.
Outlandish and frequently hilarious.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-935554-07-3
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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
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
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