Unspeakably and endlessly funny. Unless you’re a former president.
Wicked humorist Buckley shoots fish in a barrel and makes them dance.
The targets in this sendup of Washington—trial lawyers, first families, Court TV, MSNBC, Dan Rather, the FBI, the Secret Service, and the American appetite for the awful—are the last decade’s scandals, which, rather than being gluey and unbearable in the reheating, are even more fun this time around. The setup is the death of America’s philanderer-in-chief Ken McMann after an exhausting round of hide the salami with songwriter, mother of mercy to the Middle East, and extremely generous campaign donor Babette Van Anka in the Lincoln bedroom. The game was complicated by the strange refusal of the executive salami to de-tumesce, and US president made it back to his own bedroom in the small hours only to run into the buzzsaw of a wide-awake Elizabeth Tyler “Beth” McMann, First Lady of the Land. There was the usual and, considering the situation, thoroughly justifiable screaming fight, but the couple eventually tucked in for the night. Alas, dawn revealed a dead president and, since the presidential forehead bore the imprint of Paul Revere’s mark from the bottom of the sterling spittoon hurled by Mrs. M., the new First Widow is charged with murder. To her rescue comes Boyce “Shameless” Baylor, America’s top trial lawyer, the man who successfully defended athletic wife murderer J. J. Bronco. It’s not the first meeting for Beth and Boyce. Before she threw him over for handsome, hard-charging war hero Ken McMann in law school, Beth and Boyce had been an item. And, although it was she who picked up the phone and called for help, she can’t help wondering whether, being still a little sore at her, he might throw the match. But Baylor’s competitive instincts are as unquenchable as the late president’s lust, and Beth is still a dish. The battle is joined. It’s a lulu.
Unspeakably and endlessly funny. Unless you’re a former president.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50734-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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