A rich, pretty teenager flees the bourgeois terrors of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, heading straight for the demimonde of E-Z living, star-studded L.A., where she gives birth to the hottest child star since the current ambassador to Czechoslovakia. Wilkins (Elements of Chance, 1989) was West Coast bureau chief for E-Z reading, star- studded People magazine. Caught in flagrante with her cute but baseborn boyfriend by her icy banker father, 16-year-old Beth Carol Barnes lifts four hundred dollars from the family cashbox and takes the midnight bus out of town, hoping to find warmth and tolerance in southern California. She is joined in midflight by tacky, resourceful Fern Darling, also in her teens, also headed for L.A. The two girls will be linked for the rest of their silly lives even though they separate on arrival. Fern takes the low road to a career as a gossip czaress; Beth Carol takes the low road to social prominence and newsworthy motherhood. Beth Carol's undoer is preppy drug- dealer and Yale graduate Paul Fournier, who would have everybody believe he owns the mansion he inhabits even though he is the child of a lowly secretary. Nine sordid months after her arrival, Beth Carol gives birth to Raleigh Barnes, who may or may not be Paul's child but who is certainly the most photogenic, cooperative, sensible, and box-office-bankable baby you could ask for. But there is a mystery about little Raleigh that leads to the pubescent child's disappearance at the hands of supposedly trustworthy supposed father Paul. Washing up on the shore of Mexico, young Raleigh acquires wisdom at an intellectual colony, picks up a degree at the University of Chicago, acquires a fortune, becomes gorgeous, and returns to L.A. bent on revenge. Perfect reading for the waiting room or the grocery line. Robin Leach should do the cassette version if Mary Hart can't.
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-06-017957-0
Page Count: 468
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1992
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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