Gleeful jumble of Brit-style slapstick, puns, and sly wit. Quite a treat.
Clever potshots from English bestseller Holden (Gossip Hound, 2002, etc.).
Slackmucklethwaite? Where’s that? Next door to the arse end of nowhere, but its inhabitants are a cheerful lot, especially when a posh new development of expensive homes slides into the century-old mining tunnels beneath it. Looks like a front-page story for the local newspaper, the Mercury (affectionately known as the Mockery), and Slackmucklethwaite’s own Lois Lane, Kate Clegg, whips out her pad and pencil—um, she can’t find her pad and pencil. Maybe it’s under the panting, thrusting romance titled Northern Gigolo that she’s penning in her spare time? Well, she still lives with her mum and dad and Gran in a house called Wit’s End, and she’s not going to make a name for herself as a journalist at this rate, is she? Especially not when the Mockery’s new owner, loudmouthed, porcine Peter Hardstone, kills the story. Looks like a conflict-of-interest scandal is brewing, but Kate is distracted by the godlike handsomeness and incandescent sexiness of Peter’s son Nate, who was just thrown out of Oxford for using drugs. He’s a sexy bastard, he is, but could he possibly be the man of her dreams? Oh, dear—he just happened to see her in that yellow-and-tangerine quasi-poncho-tank-top thingy her Gran knitted for her. So maybe not. Oh, who cares about all Hardstones? Kate was working at the paper only for a press credential to go to Cannes and cover the film festival anyway. Off she goes to the land of palm trees and sunshine to goggle at the stars, deal-makers, flacks, and suck-ups who flock there once a year for the next best thing to the Oscars. Holden cuts them all down to size, and our Kate finds true love at last. Along the way, Holden’s deft management of a huge cast of zany types ensures that the breakneck pace never flags.
Gleeful jumble of Brit-style slapstick, puns, and sly wit. Quite a treat.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2004
ISBN: 0-452-28517-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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