A pop-culture send-up with a troubled material girl anti-heroine. Although wickedly funny at times, this odd debut takes a...
Poor little rich girl Babe Walker hits rock bottom during a Barneys shopping spree in this faux memoir based on a popular Twitter feed.
In a town (Los Angeles, naturally) filled with the chronically self-absorbed, Babe stands out. The precocious only child of a wildly successful British entertainment lawyer and a long-absent mystery woman, Babe is raised for the most part by her Jamaican nanny, Mabinty. Mabinty smokes a lot of weed and speaks with an exaggerated patois—or at least she does in Babe’s point of view, which is none too reliable. Diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder at the tender age of 7, Babe has serious boundary issues. As a sophomore, she plots to lose her virginity to her gay best friend Roman (while they are dressed as Danny and Sandy from Grease). In her teens she lobbies a series of befuddled plastic surgeons for a labiaplasty, insisting that her vagina needs to be “cute and chic-er and more…me.” She steals her file from her longtime therapist, Susan, and goes to five different colleges before deciding academia might not be her thing. And when she does meet a nice guy who actually likes her, she transforms into her alter ego Babette, a slutty stalker with an unfortunate taste for tacky chain restaurants. Showing some aptitude for fashion, Babe is understandably devastated when her line of high-end dashikis for African children fails, and soon after that another romantic disappointment triggers the mother of all retail binges. After spending a cool $246,893.50 at Barneys, she cops to needing some help and sends herself to Cirque Lodge, a Utah rehab facility. Once there, she resists actually changing but manages to bond with an alcoholic former model who might actually hold a key piece to the puzzle that is Babe.
A pop-culture send-up with a troubled material girl anti-heroine. Although wickedly funny at times, this odd debut takes a shallow, cavalier attitude toward mental illness, anorexia and addiction.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2454-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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