by Bruce Wagner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2003
A brutal phantasmagoria on the pleasures and perils of the dream factory.
Strivers in Hollywood: some rise to fame, others fall into the flames.
Wagner slims down from the delirious labyrinthine excess of I’ll Let You Go (2002) with this shorter, sharper tale of those battling toward the top of the Hollywood heap. Receiving top billing is Kit Lightwood, a Brad Pittesque hunk of burning stardom who is finally looking to be taken seriously as an actor. On the other end of the spectrum is Becca, as clueless as they come and wanting to be a star. Because of her apparent resemblance to Drew Barrymore, Becca gets a job as a Drew look-alike for a talent agency that specializes in such things. It’s a strange netherworld she enters into, including two battling Russell Crowe imitators, an experience that heightens Becca’s tabloid obsession with the real Drew, whom she commiserates with in long sprawling interior monologues (a Wagner specialty). Circling around the outside of this narrative is Lisanne, an executive secretary in her late 30s with a pathological fear of flying. Her seemingly mundane life intersects with Kit’s later on, but for too much of the time Wagner keeps her bumping around the story with little connection to the drama at its core. Kit’s life takes a downward turn when an attack by a rabid fan results in a head injury that takes months of recovery—his slow return to the media spotlight is written with extraordinary grace and an almost frightening knowledge of the vicissitudes of the media monster. At the same time, Becca’s life starts on the ascent when she gets cast as a corpse on Six Feet Under, which leads to her getting a role in the new Spike Jonze movie, about celebrity look-alikes. Wagner’s ability to limn the mercurial ways of Hollywood is astonishing, and he still writes with a fiery grace. Occasionally, he gets lost in the bushes, but he always bursts back out with a fury.
A brutal phantasmagoria on the pleasures and perils of the dream factory.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-4337-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
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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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