A candid portrait of a man torn between two worlds, whose struggle will reverberate in readers’ souls.
When a young, wildly successful ad executive is unexpectedly fired from a 1970s Madison Avenue ad agency, he must come to terms with his closeted identity as a Stonewall-era gay man and differentiate the truly meaningful from the inconsequential in Baker’s debut.
Tim Halladay is nothing less than the golden boy at his high-profile New York ad agency. Recently promoted to vice president at the age of 27, he is the youngest company officer. Immersed in an opulent world of three-martini lunches and exorbitant expense accounts, Tim is living the dream. But when he is unexpectedly fired, his cloud bursts and he comes crashing back down to Earth. He soon realizes that, with a mere $300 in savings, his sizable credit card debt has morphed into a menacing leviathan that threatens to turn his world upside down. With no truly close friends to turn to, Tim is forced to look within himself for solace. At this point in the book the author begins a series of flashbacks; these detailed memories give readers an expansive depth of insight into Tim’s character and how he weathers the soul-searching dilemma in which he now finds himself. Baker nimbly leads readers back and forth through time, interweaving the defining moments of this young man’s life into the events of a long weekend. As Tim’s dysfunctional family and stuffy upbringing come into focus, the reason he’s chosen to keep his sexuality hidden becomes increasingly obvious: His father has long made it clear that Tim’s penchant for theater and his not-so-macho demeanor are utter disappointments. Tim will never fit neatly into his father’s country club mold, and they both know it. Nor is his mother much help, largely powerless in the patriarchal culture of 1950s Connecticut. Tim’s rejection of his father’s ideal has heavily influenced the man he has become. Readers from all backgrounds will find themselves empathizing with Baker’s protagonist as he struggles to reconcile his high-profile life with his true identity.
A candid portrait of a man torn between two worlds, whose struggle will reverberate in readers’ souls.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-1450271271
Page Count: 212
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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