Scriptwriter McLaughlin toils earnestly to pack sex, sensationalism, and B-list names into his follow-up to Glamourpuss (1994): Here, a wide-eyed Hollywood newcomer finds love, work, and a rock star for a best friend. Jason Dallin, fresh from Ohio, is nursing champagne dreams while punching a time clock as a video-store clerk. By an improbable turn of events, he finds himself house-sitting a $10- million Beverly Hills mansion where his neighbors turn out to be his idol, has-been pop star Marina Stetson, and her husband Hank. Jason's fawning adoration and bottomless knowledge of music trivia win over Marina, who's feeling insecure about her comeback album and who inexplicably doesn't seem to have any other friends. By force of will, Jason keeps his lust for Hank secret. But hunky Hank shows up alone one night, and some manly swimming races evolve into graphically rendered poolside groping. Hank, it turns out, has just realized he's gay and is smitten with Jason. Jason, for his part, wakes up to moral qualms but sorts out his loyalties. Then Marina shows up devastated—she's discovered her husband's gayness, though she doesn't know about him and Jason. And Jason, inspired by the trauma of a recent mugging, writes a brilliant video script for one of the songs on her new album—the needed ticket to the job of his dreams. But what will happen if his best friend and music-industry mentor sees the surreptitiously made video (don't ask) of his night of passion with her by-now-estranged husband? Subplots abound. Jason's former roommate, obsessive-compulsive Tricia, for instance, feels she deserves to move up at the talent agency where she's best known for her neatly typed Rolodex cards. Her frustration turns to revenge when her brutish boyfriend (with an agenda of his own?) coaches her on just how to sabotage her unappreciative boss. A good-natured, unapologetically shallow Cinderella story with X-rated interludes.
Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1997
ISBN: 0-525-94058-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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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