Generic gags, creaky satire. Anyone who’s a fan of vintage David Letterman knows that Elliott is a comedy writer capable of...
The star of Cabin Boy and author of The Shroud of the Thwacker (2005) takes on Everest.
Still recovering from the breakup of his marriage to designer Vera Wang and obsessed with his eccentric, mountain-climbing great uncle, a sad-sack protagonist with the same name as his creator decides to climb Mount Everest. Such an expedition doesn’t come cheap, though, and the would-be explorer must convince a few celebrities of the wealthier sort to accompany him on his quest. His first recruit is an octogenarian actress named Lauren who is given to reminiscences about Humphrey Bogart. She’s a smart dame and a tough cookie, and it’s her idea to lure other celebrities with the promise of promoting their pet causes. So, a crooner named Tony joins the team so that he can increase public awareness about the scourge of homemade pasta. A sweetly idiotic ingénue named Kirsten agrees to climb as a protest against animal testing. An actor named Martin—who once played the president on TV and now cannot separate fiction from reality—convinces Chris to let him come along, and the whole thing is being filmed by a corpulent, muckraking filmmaker named Michael. Elliott seems to have two goals: One is to lampoon the memoir-as-extreme-sport genre, exemplified by the work of Jon Krakauer; the other is to spoof celebrity culture. He succeeds with neither. Parody gets stale pretty quickly, and Krakauer’s Into Thin Air is already a decade old. Jokes about an actress who did her defining work in the 1940s aren’t exactly timely, either. His take on Hollywood’s excesses and absurdities is no more knowing than that of the average Us Weekly subscriber, and his satire is considerably less entertaining than the celebrity self-sabotage delivered by TMZ.com.
Generic gags, creaky satire. Anyone who’s a fan of vintage David Letterman knows that Elliott is a comedy writer capable of strange delights, but none of his weird gifts are on display here.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-60286-007-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An improvement over The Dead Zone, with King returning to his most tried-and-true blueprint. As in The Shining, the psi-carrier is a child, an eight-year-old girl named Charlie; but instead of foresight or hindsight, Charlie has firestarting powers. She looks and a thing pops into flame—a teddy bear, a nasty man's shoes, or (by novel's end) steel walls, whole houses, and stables and crowds of government villains. Charlie's parents Vicky and Andy were once college guinea pigs for drug experiments by The Shop, a part of the supersecret Department of Scientific Intelligence, and were given a hyperpowerful hallucinogen which affected their chromosomes and left each with strange powers of mental transference and telekinesis. When Vicky and Andy married, their genes produced Charlie and her wild talent for pyrokinesis: even as a baby in her crib, Charlie would start fires when upset and, later on, once set her mother's hands on fire. So Andy is trying to teach Charlie how to keep her volatile emotions in check. But when one day he comes home to find Vicky gruesomely dead in the ironing-board-closet, murdered by The Shop (all the experimental guinea pigs are being eliminated), Andy goes into hiding with Charlie in Manhattan and the Vermont backwoods—and Charlie uses her powers to set the bad men on fire and blow up their cars. They're soon captured, however, by Rainbird, a one-eyed giant Indian with a melted face—and father and daughter, separated, spend months being tested in The Shop. Then Andy engineers their escape, but when Andy is shot by Rainbird, Charlie turns loose her atomic eyes on the big compound. . . . Dumb, very, and still a far cry from the excitement of The Shining or Salem's Lot—but King keeps the story moving with his lively fire-gimmick and fewer pages of cotton padding than in his recent, sluggish efforts. The built-in readership will not be disappointed.
Pub Date: Sept. 29, 1980
ISBN: 0451167805
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1980
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
In part a perfectly paced mystery story, in part an Indian Wuthering Heights: a gorgeous and seductive fever dream of a...
A brilliantly constructed first novel that untangles an intricate web of sexual and caste conflict in a vivid style reminiscent of Salman Rushdie's early work.
The major characters are Estha and Rahel, the fraternal twin son and daughter of a wealthy family living in the province of Kerala. The family's prosperity is derived from a pickle factory and rubber estate, and their prideful Anglophilia essentially estranges them from their country's drift toward Communism and their ``inferiors' '' hunger for independence and equality. The events of a crucial December day in 1969—including an accidental death that may have been no accident and the violent consequences that afflict an illicit couple who have broken "the Love Law''—are the moral and narrative center around which the episodes of the novel repeatedly circle. Shifting backward and forward in time with effortless grace, Roy fashions a compelling nexus of personalities that influence the twins' "eerie stealth'' and furtive interdependence. These include their beautiful and mysteriously remote mother Ammu; her battling "Mammachi'' (who runs the pickle factory) and "Pappachi'' (an insufficiently renowned entomologist); their Oxford-educated Marxist Uncle Chacko and their wily "grandaunt'' Baby Kochamma; and the volatile laborite "Untouchable'' Velutha, whose relationship with the twins' family will prove his undoing. Roy conveys their explosive commingling in a vigorous prose dominated by odd syntactical and verbal combinations and coinages (a bad dream experience during midday nap-time is an "aftermare'') reminiscent of Gerard Manly Hopkins's "sprung rhythm,'' incantatory repetitions, striking metaphors (Velutha is seen ``standing in the shade of the rubber trees with coins of sunshine dancing on his body'') and sensuous descriptive passages (``The sky was orange, and the coconut trees were sea anemones waving their tentacles, hoping to trap and eat an unsuspecting cloud'').
In part a perfectly paced mystery story, in part an Indian Wuthering Heights: a gorgeous and seductive fever dream of a novel, and a truly spectacular debut. (First serial to Granta)Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-45731-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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