Wilson’s ambition to be a memorable satirist of pop culture is thwarted by her high-decibel prose: she needs to bring the...
Overwrought debut of a teenager’s messy attempts to achieve showbiz celebrity.
Wilson has debunked the cult of celebrity before, in her equally overwrought essay collection A Massive Swelling (2000). Here, the prime culprit is Peppy Normal, whose showbiz aspirations haven’t taken her beyond a topless juggling act in Reno. The movie Fame is an eye-opener, and Peppy’s mission now is to propel her two kids to stardom. Ned proves a lost cause but Liza is more malleable, though hardly more talented. We first see her looking like an “underage sex-clown” as she auditions for a TV commercial. It’s the early 1980s, and Peppy has moved the family into an abandoned firehouse in the Bay Area, ideal for amateur theatricals—the opening production of Sound of Music is so abysmal it becomes a camp hit. Meanwhile, Liza, loud, unstable and seriously uncool, is struggling with high school. Early on, she will willingly lose her virginity to her classroom tormentor in a supply closet. Wilson’s idea is to put Liza through the wringer, and she does it in prose that lurches from one gaudy hyperbole to another. Liza develops a monster-size crush on ChoCho, a Superfly drug dealer who might, in her addled judgment, be her stairway to the stars. Even though she drops out, the scenes she moves on to are high school writ large: drugs, cliques, insecurities. That goes both for the Haight, where she has a bad acid trip while living with would-be elves, and for Tinseltown, where she betrays her friends and tries to kill herself (like Peppy, years before). Her lack of autonomy might not matter if Wilson brought a fresh eye to these familiar venues, but she really doesn’t. She does ease up on Liza, however, allowing her a successful act in Vegas as “an icon of camp depravity.”
Wilson’s ambition to be a memorable satirist of pop culture is thwarted by her high-decibel prose: she needs to bring the volume down, way down.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-00-715460-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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