A novel that shows our nation's path from refreshing nonconformity to end-times careerism.
This autobiographical novel about a year spent as Hunter S. Thompson’s personal assistant contains crazy highs (of course) and many dismal lows.
This is a harrowing book, depicting Thompson (here called Walker Reade) in the twilight of his career, with his writing powers waning and self-esteem in peril. He needs an assistant—and hires only young, female ones—to help him stay on track to finish a book. Della Pietra’s narrator, aspiring writer Alley Russo, wants to escape her dreary bartending gig on Long Island and the low expectations of her blue-collar family. She arrives in Colorado to find a group of hangers-on trying to keep Walker happy by laughing at his jokes and sharing his cocaine, and she feels the pressure to fall into lock step. The extent to which she does is what makes this story so horrifying, as well as fascinating. Alley clicks with Walker, and she captures his surly, blunt, occasionally brilliant dialogue with a writer’s ear. She joins in with the drug-taking and constant drinking, having been told it’s part of her duties, and also keeps him writing—an achievement in this atmosphere. But Walker has become a mean drunk and submits the women around him to a lot of abuse. He insists Alley dress sexier, even driving her to a local mall and giving judgments on outfits she models for him. He calls her “moron” one minute and has his hand on her knee the next. That an intelligent Ivy League graduate chooses to go along with this treatment, feeling there’s no other path away from anonymity, gives the book an undercurrent of horror. That said, it has the allure of a car crash—you’ll keep reading as Walker’s antics become more outrageous and his mood more foul. There's also something poignant in the vulnerability he occasionally reveals to his young assistant; they’re attracted to each other, but this is one area Della Pietra seems to have gauged as too dangerous to tap. Nevertheless, their intimacy grows even in a cloud of hangovers, freshly mixed drinks, and the ever present drugs. At one point, Alley muses that Walker can’t give up his wildly indulgent lifestyle because it’s too much a part of his public identity. It's simply sad, though, that a writer of Walker's caliber thinks the main thing he has to contribute to American letters is being constantly wasted.
A novel that shows our nation's path from refreshing nonconformity to end-times careerism.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0014-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
BOOK TO SCREEN
A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.
A German teenager whose family moves to Alabama gets a deep-fried Southern gothic education.
Max is gifted, but if you’re thinking “honors student,” think again. He touches dead animals or withered plants and they return to life; whether his power (or curse, as Max thinks of it) works on dead people is part of the story’s suspense. The curse comes with pitfalls: Migraines besiege him after his resurrections, and he craves gobs of sugar. This insightful novel isn’t a fantasy, and Hudson treats Max’s gift as quite real. In addition, Hudson, an Alabama native, memorably evokes her home state, both its beauty and its warped rituals. Max’s father is an engineer, and the car company where he works has transferred him to a factory in Alabama; Max’s parents hope living there will give him a clean break from his troubled love for his dead classmate, Nils. Max is drawn to Pan, a witchy gay boy who wears dresses and believes in auras and incantations. Pan is the only person who knows about Max’s power. But Max also becomes enchanted with the Judge, a classmate's powerful father who’s running for governor and is vociferous about his astringent faith in Christ after an earlier life of sin (it's hard to read the novel and not think of Judge Roy Moore, who ran for U.S. Senate from Alabama, as the Judge’s real-life analogue). The Judge has plans for Max, who feels torn between his love for outcast Pan and the feeling of belonging the Judge provides. But that belonging has clear costs; the Judge likes to test potential believers by dosing them with poison. The real believers survive. Hudson invokes the tropes of Alabama to powerful effect: the bizarre fundamentalism; the religion of football; the cultlike unification of church and state. The tropes run the risk of feeling hackneyed, but this is Southern gothic territory, after all. Hudson brings something new to that terrain: an overt depiction of queer desire, welcome because writers such as Capote’s and McCullers’ depictions of queerness were so occluded.
A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-629-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
More trite truthiness from Coelho.
A Swiss journalist strives to redress the meaninglessness of her life with even more meaningless sexual encounters in Coelho’s latest pseudo-philosophical screed.
Linda, a respected newspaper reporter in Geneva, is happily married to a handsome, wealthy and generous financier. The couple is blessed with beautiful and well-behaved children, at least from what we see of the progeny, which isn’t much. The vicissitudes of domestic life aren’t Coelho’s concern unless they offer a pretext for platitudes about the eternal verities and The Things That Matter. When she interviews Jacob, a former flame from school days who's now a rising politician, Linda behaves professionally right until she administers a parting blow job. The ensuing affair jolts Linda out of the low-grade depression she has been experiencing despite her enviable lifestyle. Her adulterous behavior disturbs her, however, since she can't explain her own motives. After briefly trying therapy, she consults a Cuban shaman, to no avail (except to generate a successful series of in-depth features on occult healing). Her bafflement is shared by the reader, who will be puzzled by the total lack of any convincing reason why she should be so infatuated with Jacob, who, in addition to being very thinly portrayed, apparently can’t decide whether his amorous strategy should be sensitive and romantic or something 50 or so shades greyer. After a close call—Jacob’s astute spouse almost exposes her—Linda decides that the fling isn't worth destroying lives over, as if these shallow existences were under any threat to begin with. Along the way to this realization, Coelho milks each opportunity to preach—by way of endless interior monologues, quotes from Scripture and talky scenes—sermons about love, marriage, sexual attraction, evolutionary theory and every other imponderable he can muster. Occasional interesting tidbits about the novel’s setting, the French-speaking Swiss canton of Vaud, are not enough to redeem the pervasive mawkishness.
More trite truthiness from Coelho.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-101-87408-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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