by Bruce Wagner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1991
Smashing debut novel in which screenwriter Bud Wiggin, a Thomas Wolfe for failed screenwriters, seems to be a stand-in for author Wagner—screenwriter of the stupid but successful Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills and Nightmare on Elm Street 3. Wiggin never achieves Wagner's modest triumphs, however: his scripts only blacken his standing in the Business. Force Majeure novelizes some high-class short stories about Wiggin that struck loving chords in Hollywood when published earlier: they join here with compelling density into one large arc of characterization as Bud falls from failure to total moral disaster. The episodes trace his horror story from script to floppo script, each chapter giving him one large antagonist to play against: giant studio-exec Joseph Harmon, who seduces Bud in Harmon's white Bentley convertible; aging genius Caitlin Wurth, Hollywood's most dazzling screenwriter, who has mental problems and makes endless, raging phone calls on outdoor phones and at last gives Bud her brilliant screenplay of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove for him to rewrite and sell as his own; Jerry Linley, alias the mystically wise Rav, a con man who grants himself a background as a Holocaust survivor and now believes it—and many other huge rascals. The darkly downbeat climax is intentionally unfilmable (Bud has fellatio with a 10-year-old girl), although Oliver Stone has already optioned Wagner's screenplay of the novel. Despite a lack of rising action and some verbal leaps that never find a foothold, this is superb stuff—the best yet about Hollywood's humiliated lower orders as they grasp at recovery programs or head for high-priced mental farms. Bud is magnificently memorable, his brain in flood with three-act scripts that rival Postcards from the Snake Pit, Miss Lonelyhearts, Sunset Boulevard or Look Homeward, Oscar. Richly done boffo winner.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1991
ISBN: 9780743268967
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1991
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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