Walker’s debut displays a depth of characterization that almost transcends the shopworn premise.
The anxieties of four suburban mothers surface as they plan a benefit for underprivileged women.
Janie, who never misses a Pilates class and can drink any number of vanilla lattes with caloric impunity, is the envy of her three girlfriends—Love, Gayle and Marie—all residents of upscale Hunting Ridge, Conn. But she’s desperately staving off middle age with surgery, not to mention a clandestine, motel-room affair. Meanwhile, Love, married to an ER doctor, has just received an unsettling letter from her estranged father that threatens to re-open a traumatic episode that halted her halcyon years as a child genius. Gayle, heiress to New England old money, is increasingly intimidated by her lawyer husband, Troy, who resents his financial dependence on her. Marie gave up a lucrative New York legal career for motherhood and a less demanding private practice in family law. The four friends are co-hosting a gala to take place at Gayle’s estate, proceeds to go to a women’s clinic. Gayle’s carefully orchestrated, pharmaceutically assisted life veers off course when she realizes Troy is bullying their young son, Oliver. When her cook, sensitive artist Paul, intervenes, Troy fires Paul. Love is suffering from debilitating back pain, and her mother, aging Hollywood actress Yvonne, convinces Love that her pain is the outward manifestation of suppressed emotions that will only be released by a confrontation with her father. Marie, for her part, is battling a powerful attraction to her law clerk, Randy. She’s handling a divorce case that explodes when she uncovers the secret behind the accidental death of her client’s toddler. The suspense here is largely dependent on withholding information from the reader. The identity of Janie’s lover could be revealed much earlier, as could the exact nature of Love’s childhood trauma, without detracting from the best feature of this novel: the characters’ ability to spellbind even as they whine about unhelpful, demanding, clueless husbands or otherwise appear to wallow in victimhood.
Walker’s debut displays a depth of characterization that almost transcends the shopworn premise.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36771-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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
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PROFILES
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