A slow cooker with an unpromising title offers satisfying, intellectual storytelling.
Mendelson proves she has staying power with this subtly drawn second novel.
The author revisits the territory of Morningside Heights (2003): a staid, hyper-professional Columbia University neighborhood of long-married couples and the chronically single. Likable corporate lawyer Peter Frankl and his prickly artist wife Lesley are terribly mismatched, but have endured 30 years together at 444 Riverside Drive for the sake of the children—handsome, happy-go-lucky MBA Louis and sensible, highly intellectual Susan, finishing her doctorate in musicology and already spinsterish though not quite 30. Lesley has essentially harnessed Peter into a moneymaking career and spendthrift lifestyle that are deeply repugnant to him. When she falls into a long coma after a car accident, he feels emotionally released to pursue more academic and artistic pleasures, such as meetings at the dotty, philanthropic Devereaux Foundation, of which he is a member. Manipulative, self-absorbed Lesley’s removal from the family orbit also seems to loosen her offspring’s emotional stays. Susan takes up with a snide, unappreciative Yale playwright she meets at a party thrown by her best friend, journalist Mallory Holmes. Louis, proving his mettle, pursues pretty, intelligent Mallory, whose parents live in the same building as the Frankls. In fact, the whole neighborhood begins to crawl with significant neighbors, such as the creepy, sadistic critic Edmond Lockhart, who invites Peter over for dinner in order to insult him, and timorous, hysterical fellow Devereaux member Hilda Hughes, who develops a poignant crush on Peter that enables her finally to quit a near-lifetime course of psychotherapy. Mendelson effectively narrates Peter’s emotional frustration vis-à-vis his wife, but somewhat derails the story by dabbling in the petty concerns of younger, tertiary characters. However, the author certainly knows her neighborhood, and she has polished an elegant, omniscient prose style modeled on the finest English novelists.
A slow cooker with an unpromising title offers satisfying, intellectual storytelling.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-50837-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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