by Dana Spiotta ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 23, 2001
Mostly unmemorable people, but a witty satire, nonetheless, about the lives of the idle and beautiful.
The glittering if ephemeral distractions of life in the City of Angels are lampooned with a wry, knowing touch, in a funny first novel by a writer who grew up “surrounded by the movie industry.”
Everyone knows that if you live in L.A., you drive everywhere. Even when the destination is just to the corner, the sidewalks serve only an ornamental purpose. So Mina’s insistence on walking just about everywhere she goes seems not just strange to her friends and husband but more than a little affected. Affectation, however, is the name of the game for almost everyone here. Mina’s best friend, Lorena, is a walking encyclopedia of fashion, her antennae tuned to the slightest shiftings in the cultural winds. Mina herself is the underachieving, neurotic daughter of a once-wealthy film-industry family who now spends her time working in one of Lorena’s restaurants, squabbling with her screenwriter husband, David, and having affairs with two other men. She’s always late to everything and doesn’t have much purpose in life or a driving need to find one. The story, which amounts to little more than interior musings by the characters as they go about their daily routines, is mostly an excuse for Spiotta to engage in some amusing takes on the post-everything ennui of modern-day Los Angeles—including a chain of holistic-therapy clinics where clients cure their inner ills with programs like Tactile Hue Therapy and Spiritual Exfoliation and Detoxification. A featherweight dusting of surreal comedy keeps the proceedings engagingly light but grow disorienting when Spiotta tries to dig into deeper territory. The peripheral character of Lisa, Lorena’s cleaning woman, is depicted without the sure hand Spiotta brings to her other, non–working-class characters. Meanwhile, Lisa’s situation, with her money woes, angry husband, and demanding children, comes off as fake and artificial, the author resorting to cultural clichés when she ventures into what seems to be unfamiliar territory.
Mostly unmemorable people, but a witty satire, nonetheless, about the lives of the idle and beautiful.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1261-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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