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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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