Buckley is a literary WMD. Thank heavens he’s ours.
Buckley (Washington Schlepped Here, 2003; No Way to Treat a First Lady, 2002, etc.) jauntily flips pies at Middle Eastern dynasties, splattering meringue on the CIA, the State Department, the French, the mullahs, and anyone else standing nearby. Who could not laugh?
How this one slipped past the sensitivity censors is a mystery, but a happy mystery. Barely disguising the Royal House of Saud, its 40,000 crown princes, or the murderously fundamental clergy it supports, Buckley uses the baton passed to him by the dying Evelyn Waugh to ridicule America’s most embarrassing ally in the most amusing way possible, deploying high gags and low (camel gas is the best). Our heroine is beautiful State Department Arabist Florence Farfaletti, 32, who receives a midnight phone call from Nazrah, a princess married to Prince Bawad, a Washington fixture and one of the 40,000 crown princes of the oil-rich kingdom of Wasabia (Buckley’s puns never let up, but they’re good). Princess Nazrah has fled the odiously polygamous Bawad to seek asylum at the CIA, but the gates are down and the Wasabian guards are about to drag her back to certain execution. Can’t Florence do something? Alas, there’s no time, and the rebellious princess loses her head. A furious Florence finds herself mysteriously financed as she hatches a scheme to bring down the Wasabis and all the other patriarchal oligarchs by means of a sort of Arab Lifetime Channel, television for anyone restless in her burqah. Assisted by a gay friend from the Arab desk, an exuberant Gucci Gulch flack, and a handsome and resourceful Cajun mercenary, Florence sets up her broadcasting shop in the emirate of Matar, where the sheika Laila, wife of the booby on the throne, is eager to help out. More heads roll, and Florence almost loses her own before things are sorted out.
Buckley is a literary WMD. Thank heavens he’s ours.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6223-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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