Serio-sex fiction about the morals of movie folk: a third novel from screenwriter Goldsmith (Strange Ailments, Uncertain Cures, 1986; Blue Numbers, 1989). What can you say about a Hollywood flack whose wife is trading him in for a realtor with low animal sexuality but a high success profile and a $400,000 Porsche 959 in his garage? That's what Saul Bronstein, a self-proclaimed failure even at public relations, asks himself when wife Anita takes up with Rudy Malinowski. But Saul, once also a failure as a stand-up comic, sees that he loves his wife anyway, a woman whose belief in him time and again lifts his spirit and whose love he determines to win back. How to do it? Resist failure! Make an earnings breakthrough, boost himself into a lifestyle not far from Rudy's, become a success! As publicist for a Los Angeles film festival, he talks the main promoter into a marathon of Hard R (a film rating just below X) films by Lucy Montana, an actress who between ages 16 and 20 made 14 Hard R films, then disappeared following a shooting scandal involving two jealous rivals. Saul thinks that the festival could go over the top if it ran all 14 films in a continuous back-to-back marathon. But will Lucy herself appear for the festival, a black-tie dinner, and plenty of p.r.? Saul seeks her out and finds the 35-year-old beauty still a Monroe-Bardot sex kitten who at first doesn't want to go public but then agrees. Saul and Lucy will strike gold at every turn, but the reader questions a determination to win back an unfaithful wife and overcome a profound ``failure complex'' with splashy earnings, while Goldsmith keeps Saul utterly solemn and spouting with moral earnestness like Philip Wylie against the world's latest generation of vipers as he enjoys a Hard R bed romp that verges on an X rating. Schizoid and trivial but strong on jealousy.
Pub Date: May 30, 1995
ISBN: 1-878179-15-2
Page Count: 389
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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