Much fun but falls off.
Screenwriter Wolper’s latest raking over of Hollywood.
Once more she goes on too long, although this is the shortest of her three works. Mr. Famous is an aging action film star on the downslide whose doomed, dark-toned current offering, Last Standing, sounds very much like the doomed, dark-toned Depression-era el floppo flick Last Man Standing that starred Bruce Willis (and was a dullish remake of Kurosawa’s seriocomic action masterpiece Yojimbo). Mr. Famous, or simply Mr. F, is the nickname given to Victor Mason by his chef/nutritionist, failed TV writer Lucinda, who sounds much like failed screenwriter Elizabeth West of Wolper’s Cigarette Girl (1999) and who shows up for a chapter herein, as she did in Secret Celebrity. Mr. Famous has had a literary novel under option for over ten years. He knows he can’t make it until he has two action megahits back to back. Then he’ll be allowed to film Skate, which is almost certain to tank—although Bruce Willis’s extremely low-keyed The Sixth Sense (coasting on Armageddon) had money falling out the bank-windows. Mr. F, going through a midcareer crisis, tends to lock himself into his bedroom for three days running—meals left by the door. So Lucinda sends him off to see her shrink, Dr. Davenport, who tells Mr. F that he’s no longer alive but has turned into, well, Victor Mason, action film star. This really upsets Mr. F, who rants against this clear truth to Lucinda, then takes her on a quickie plane flight to Boston, then by limo to his hometown, Falmouth, on Cape Cod, in search of lost time. Unlike California, Falmouth suffers gray rainy days. But Dr. D’s truth at last works its way through, and Victor gears up for serious acting, teaches a film class, and sets out to save Last Man from the suits. There’s a mini-subplot about Lucinda’s ex-boyfriend stalking her, but that suspense tidbit goes nowhere.
Much fun but falls off.Pub Date: June 7, 2004
ISBN: 1-57322-272-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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