A mostly satisfying rendition of the complex mother-daughter relationship, told with edgy humor and deep sympathy.
An episodic first novel of divorce, motherhood, and coming-of-age in Manhattan of the 1970s and ’80s, by the author of the story collection Out of the Girls’ Room and Into the Night (1999).
Born-and-bred New Yorker Roz Rosenzweig marries midwestern Edwin Anderson, because she’s tired of being single and can’t believe how nice he is. But after the birth of their daughter Miranda and the death of Roz’s mother, their many differences cause the marriage to founder. “The Mess Under the Bed,” a chapter composed of letters to Miranda at camp, Miranda’s letters home, and camper reports, deftly depicts the family’s strife.(Nissen has an instinct for coupling sorrow and humor.) Edwin gone, 12-year-old Miranda finds a surrogate dad in an older boy who gives her piggyback rides and her first drink. Miranda is well-drawn; the feisty child and mixed-up preadolescent grow into a wily, first-in-the-bunk-to-have-sex teenager. Sometimes the wry here tone seems to breeze over this often disheartening account of the aftermath of divorce. There’s a comical quality to the scenario of Roz falling in love with Miranda’s orthodontist and moving in with him, only to have Miranda respond by having a furtive affair with Ben, the orthodontist’s son. But when Miranda and Ben learn that his father is carrying on his own clandestine affair, Nissen captures precisely the terrible feelings of these two teenagers who are still children but behaving like adults. After the orthodontist moves out, however, the story flags: Roz takes in boarders with their own problems, and Miranda has a disastrous affair with a teacher. At the close, she’s home from college for a potentially awkward Thanksgiving with Roz’s New Age boyfriend. But what’s important, Miranda realizes, is that she and her mother are still together: they have survived her childhood.
A mostly satisfying rendition of the complex mother-daughter relationship, told with edgy humor and deep sympathy.Pub Date: May 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-41145-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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