Eccentric movie director falls prey to a sociopath sidekick and a feckless producer/lover in Steel’s methodical Hollywood morality tale.
Though a wildly successful director of blockbusters, Tallie Jones is the opposite of glamorous: Most of the time she wears her uncombed blond hair in disheveled dreads, her wardrobe is shabby, not shabby-chic, and she has an unfashionable, ill-advised tan. Her Bel Air mansion is functional, not lavish, and her live-in lover and business partner, Hunt, actually uses the high-end kitchen, preparing gourmet meals for Tallie after a long day of shooting. Tallie’s assistant and long-time best friend Brigitte, a trust-fund baby, monopolizes the glitz department: Rodeo Drive merchants happily bestow upon her free furs, jewelry and designer handbags. But Tallie’s close-knit support group is about to unravel. A potential investor in her next film wants to audit her books. Tallie’s accountant, 60ish Victor (whose plight with a gold-digging young wife provides a poignant subplot, sadly underdeveloped), complies. But how could meticulous Victor have overlooked monthly cash withdrawals of approximately $25,000 from Tallie’s accounts? Tallie’s bills are all handled (primarily by Brigitte) using checks or credit cards. Hunt and Brigitte are above suspicion—both have their own money and no overt motive to steal. Perplexed, Tallie hires a private eye, and soon her worst fears are confirmed: Hunt and Brigitte are not perfect. Not only was Hunt cheating on her with Brigitte for three years, for the last year he’s consorted with a new mistress, who’s now pregnant with his child. The FBI is called in, and handsome, down-to-earth, widowed agent Jim Kingston uncovers the full horror. The plot thickens, but never quickens: As Tallie copes with betrayals, the narrative creeps along, slowed by the characters’ repetitious musings over what could, and then did, go wrong.
Pub Date: March 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-34319-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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