Cowboy poet Black's debut, ``a rodeo novel,'' is fast out of the chute, but a cluttered, corny ride. A former bull rider, Black offers a saga set in the early 1980s, when professional rodeo athletes were still cowboys. Cody of Ten Sleep, Wyo., and his Texan buddy, Lick, travel through a season on the professional circuit. In prose that's a rhapsody to tall tales and the serial comma, the narrative twitches this way and that. Black can't seem to decide whether he's writing a Disney wild ride, with a fantasy cowboy genie who lives in a tin of chewing tobacco and talks in verse; a grisly look at rodeo, where inexperienced riders get killed by 2,000-lb. bulls; a picaresque novel of two young cowboys who want to make it to the finals in Oklahoma City; a love story; or a heehaw burlesque in which, for example, that rascal Lick is stabbed by 87 porcupine quills in his buttocks and genitals, then has them removed by a pretty young doctor, or when he gets dyed purple by his angry sweetheart. In striving to depict the whole three-ring circus, Baxter only occasionally succeeds in capturing any of it. But when he lets his twang down, he gives the reader an absorbing education in rodeo. In the details lies the real romance, and Black whets the reader's appetite for a depth that's missing in his tale of two good ole vaqueros who get thrown, get drunk, and get laid. Still, west of Al Capp, Black's the best silly-name inventor in a while, and his tale of Cody and Lick may offer receptive readers a satisfying escape and some vulgar good yuks. As a rodeo announcer, Black's got the color commentary down cold. What's missing is focus and a more absorbing narrative line.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-517-59377-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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