Siddons' latest, her 11th (after Downtown, 1994), is surprisingly low on the melodrama scale: only a handful of syrupy passages and unconvincing scenes mar this highly entertaining, unabashedly lightweight southern saga. Merritt Fowler's dutiful suburban Georgia housewife/mother routine is due for a shake-up. Husband Pom (whose grin splits his beard ``like a knife blade through dark plush'') is a doctor more concerned with the plight of the downtrodden than with the inner workings of his own household; he's oblivious to both his own mother's terrifying descent into Alzheimer's and his anorectic daughter Glynn's adolescent miseryuntil Glynn, spurred on by paternal neglect and her grandmother's destructive behavior, runs away to aunt Laura's California condo. Laura is Merritt's younger sister, a grade-B actress/babe-about-town who left home for Hollywood as a teenager and never came backhardly a role model for the delicate Glynn. Under the guise of fetching Glynn home, Merritt heads west herself, but with the subconscious goal of getting some much-needed distance from her thoughtless husband and demanding mother-in-law. In California, Hollywood high jinks ensueLaura is enmeshed in a no-win relationship with Caleb, a hot director who promises more than he delivers; and Glynn, a younger version of her still beautiful aunt, gets offered a major role in Caleb's new movie. To escape it all, the three women flee upstate to Caleb's retreat among the redwoods, where Merritt relearns passion from caretaker T.C. Bridgewateran affair that will later give her the courage to ask for what she needs at home with Pom. It takes a high-ranker on the Richter scale, though, to set everyone straight, and a stronger Merritt, matured Glynn, and wiser Laura head back south to absorb the aftershocks togetheras a family. An impressive leap forward for Siddonsall of the requisite thrills, much less gratuitous yanking on the heartstrings. (First serial to Good Housekeeping; Literary Guild main/Doubleday selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017614-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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
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