Although the writing is competent, this novel illustrates the main difficulty posed by “reality-based” fiction: the inherent...
Reality queen Frankel expands her brand with a roman à clef.
Recent NYU graduate Faith Brightstone, determined to make it as an actress, leaves Manhattan for Los Angeles. Reluctantly welcomed by her distant father, she befriends his live-in girlfriend Brooke, who introduces Faith to the L.A. club scene. There follows an episodic, summary-heavy narration of Faith’s encounters with men, old and young, most of whom do nothing to advance her career or enliven her love life. The exception is Vince Beck, a sexy producer with an Aussie accent, but, unsurprisingly, he turns out to be married. After two stints as personal assistant to the petty tyrants that are so much a staple of Hollywood literature (in a perhaps subliminal nod to Sunset Boulevard, one of Faith’s jobs ends when a scriptwriter is found dead in her employer’s pool), Faith cannot get a part—her weight, normal everywhere else, is chubbette-grade in California. Embarking, with her cheerfully bulimic roommate, on a starvation diet, she gets skinny then finally gets cast—in a soft porn flick. So much for Hollywood dreams. Part two finds Faith back in Manhattan five years later. She’s turned her obsession with weight into a promising small business. Her over-the-top repartee and entrepreneurial chops garner the attention of the producers of Domestic Goddess, a cable reality TV show hosted by Sybil Matthews, a fictional avatar of Martha Stewart, only more diabolical. The remainder of the book chronicles the usual reality show indignities as contestants are ritually humiliated and eliminated, challenge by challenge. Sybil already has Faith in her sights, since Faith has some dirt on a fellow contestant and a history with the show’s executive producer. What will the home and garden diva do when she finds out her own son is Faith’s latest club conquest?
Although the writing is competent, this novel illustrates the main difficulty posed by “reality-based” fiction: the inherent tedium of unedited real life, however glitzy the surroundings.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6737-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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