The Main Event of Portnoy’s Complaint, without the wit.
The self-absorbed narrator continually looks for (and finds) sex but is terrified, if not emasculated, by the prospect of love.
The plot is, to be charitable, episodic, as the unnamed narrator drifts from coffee shop to bar to restaurant to UCLA frat party. He gets engaged but gets out of there fast when he finds he’s being manipulated. He finds another girlfriend and eventually (kind of) decides to get married. Although he vaguely alludes to having a job, he has no visible means of support. Still, he goes through the motions of having a life: He talks to his mother on the phone, rides on an airplane, plays Mutant Storm Reloaded, Contra and Halo 2, downloads pornography, goes to a gay party, attends a graduation, insults his potential in-laws. But none of these activities—perhaps with the exception of video games and pornography—is significant. What gets him off, so to speak, is sex, in all its forms. His life is consumed with discussing, fantasizing about or engaging in sex. The narrator lives by what he calls the “ninety-eight percent rule,” a willingness to have sex with 98 percent of all women “in the age range of seventeen or so to dead,” though it’s never clear what 2 percent he excludes from his lubricious vision. He fantasizes about every woman he sees, from a girl in a bar to his girlfriend’s mother to the “subway whore”—in his eyes, all are objects and potential sex partners. And his narcissism is unbounded. In one spasm of philosophical journal reflection the narrator writes, “Remind myself that one day the sun will destroy this planet so nothing really matters.” Point taken.
The Main Event of Portnoy’s Complaint, without the wit.Pub Date: March 13, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-123167-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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