The 12th novel by the former journalist and Washington insider whose savvy analyses of power politics and related human imbroglios include Stringer (1974) and The American Ambassador (1987). The mansion the title denotes is both home and showplace for three generations of the Behl family, Washington power brokers whose careers are enhanced and personal lives compromised by their talents for working behind the scenes and keeping secrets. In the 1930s, Senator Adolph Behl is seemingly promised, then denied, a vice-presidential nomination. His son Axel, made craftier by observing his father's misfortune, carries for most of his life the burdens of grievous injury and romantic fixation experienced in wartime, and ``[operating] quietly as a fixer without portfolio'' so successfully that he's later credited with having ``won the Cold War singlehanded.'' Axel's son Alec, who inherits his father's amorous insatiability and political acumen, becomes a skillful lawyer known among the city's ``Visibles'' and ``Venerables'' as ``The Man to See in Washington.'' Just (Ambition and Love, 1994, etc.) adroitly records and entwines these men's fates with those of fictional and real politicos (Adlai Stevenson makes a memorable brief appearance) and fills his brimming novel with dozens of witty revelations of how government, business, and society really function. His characters tend to speak in near-aphorisms (good ones), and this can prove wearing—but only when Just allows them to explain themselves at self-indulgent length. They are all nonetheless vividly realized, especially Axel's first wife (and nemesis) Sylvia, a gifted poet and resilient survivor whose combative relationships with her husband and son echo, so to speak, both Ford's Parade's End and Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy. An entertaining, intelligent novel that combines the juiciness of a John O'Hara beach-blanket read with the suave assurances of Louis Auchincloss at his most acute. One of Just's best books. (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-85697-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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