Funny, suspenseful, scary and, most importantly, the best portrayal of an American Innocent since Forrest Gump.
An endearing simpleton blunders into the War on Terror in this blistering satire, the second novel by the pseudonymous Australian author of The Dolphin People.
Meet Odell Deefus, a white guy with a black name, as he puts it. He’s a big fellow, slow on the uptake, but real proud of his greatest achievement, reading that Rawlings classic The Yearling 16 times. The 21-year-old is on his way to join the Army when his ancient Chevy expires near Callisto, Kan. He’s offered shelter at a desolate farmhouse by Dean Lowry, as mean as Odell is good-natured. A misunderstanding causes Odell to accidentally kill his host with a baseball bat. There’s another dead body in the house: Odell finds Dean’s Aunt Bree in the freezer. The hole Dean had dug for her in the yard will serve for him, though Odell will have to move the body six times to avoid detection. Through it all he is contrite but stoic. He reports the missing Dean and his aunt’s death to the cops, but his small fib about Dean’s association with Muslims leads to FBI and Homeland Security involvement and a nationwide hunt for the presumed terrorist, while Odell himself becomes a suspect. The busy plot also involves an evangelical preacher linked to a right-wing Presidential contender, and Dean’s sister Lorraine, a hard-as-nails prison guard who’s part of a drug-smuggling ring. The inexperienced sentimentalist Odell had had a massive crush on Condoleezza Rice; now he falls for Lorraine. The story rolls along as Krol nicely balances humor and menace. Odell, the “starry-eyed baby bird that just fell out of the nest,” has some close calls but lands on his feet. All that changes when he is sent to a tropical base (Guantánamo); the caper aspect disappears in this horribly believable hell, where the world’s most unlikely terrorist is put through the wringer.
Funny, suspenseful, scary and, most importantly, the best portrayal of an American Innocent since Forrest Gump.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-167294-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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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