Arch, wry, and quip-ready characters can’t pump up a flaccid tale.
A rabbinical school dropout’s quarter-life passage is trip-wired with bombastic Boomers—in Naked City columnist Sohn’s overwrought second (after Run Catch Kiss, 1999).
Rachel decides to abort her career as a rabbi when a sick man she’s consoling dies critiquing her bedside manner. From there, it’s on to a new calling as bartender to a south Brooklyn gaggle of soulful misfits. Rachel’s lust life picks up when an actor friend introduces her to 48-and-holding cult filmmaker-turned-navel-gazing playwright Hank Powell. Although a super-goy, Hank could be Noel Airman to Rachel’s Marjorie Morningstar, except that Rach is no innocent and Hank’s only visible dramatic talent is crafting sexual scenarios. Perhaps our first-person protagonist should be excused for not noticing right away that Hank is a narcisso-sadist who wants only an inflatable doll, not a human, for a mate. After all, she must expend a considerable amount of energy peppering every page with double-entendres, wisecracks, and bons mots that often land with a thud (“She was the stink bomb of sex bombs”). Arguably worse, the Rachster’s mother has segued from consciousness-raising to menopause support groups seemingly overnight, and her 55-year-old father is doing the horizontal mambo with Rachel’s upstairs neighbor and former friend Liz. Rachel’s Oedipal dilemma is underscored when she has to decide whether or not to tell her mother (who must have missed American Beauty) why her paunchy unemployed father is suddenly doing sit-ups. Sohn’s Cobble Hill is so small an enclave that Rach can walk to her dress-to-order assignations with Hank and right into his boiler/bondage room—so insular a neighborhood, in fact, that the plot is powered largely by chance encounters, making the reader, along with Rachel, yearn to take the action off-borough. Slutwear, sex act-ronyms, and Boomer-bashing abound until Rachel wises up, Mom gets her power surge, and Dad’s comeuppance/epiphany narrowly escapes being an “Aw-w-w” ending.
Arch, wry, and quip-ready characters can’t pump up a flaccid tale.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-3828-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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