The fictionalized last days of James Whale, the gay Hollywood director who made Show Boat and Frankenstein, are uncompellingly and clunkily rendered by Bram (Hold Tight, 1992, etc.). After suffering a series of strokes, the 67-year-old director returns to his mansion in the Santa Monica Canyon, where he tries to recuperate by painting reproductions of Rembrandts. Having quit the studio system years before, Whale is rather removed from his old life, and his loneliness is exacerbated by his former longtime lover being away in New York. The strokes cause him to hallucinate about the past, and there are numerous flashbacks of Whale interacting with silver-screen legends like Boris Karloff, Charles Laughton, and Greta Garbo, as well as a fairly silly remembrance of his first homosexual encounter. Now, his only companionship comes from his elderly Mexican servant (a bundle of pious clichÇs) and his new gardener (a hulky, homophobic ex-marine also drawn from the cardboard-cut-out school of characterization). Hoping to rein in his galloping mind, Whale tries to persuade his gardener to pose for him; and although he is initially put off by a playful pass, he agrees to sit, whereupon Whale randomly rambles on about his life, inexplicably stunning the gardener with the revelation that Whale is in fact a real, live homosexual. Increasingly despondent over his deteriorating health, Whale later accosts the gardener in order to provoke lethal violence. By telling us early on that Whale will soon die, the only suspense here is in finding out just how. This puts a serious burden on Bram's ability to paint the details of Whale's interesting life from poor Londoner to a WW I trench soldier to an openly gay, powerful movie figure of the 1930s and '40s: Unfortunately, the novel collapses under the strain of this meandering and awkwardly written exercise. A lumbering, toothless monster.
Pub Date: April 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-93913-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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