by Dean Bakopoulos ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 2011
A dark entertainment infused by a bluesy yearning for a better America.
Novels about downward spirals and crack-ups are generally gloomy affairs, but here’s one that shimmers with mischief and offbeat charm.
Like his fine debut, Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon (2005), this author’s second novel acknowledges life’s dark side. Narrator Zeke Pappas is working on a bizarre oral-history project called An Inventory of American Unhappiness. It’s an example of cart before the horse; first comes the conclusion (“This is America. Everybody is unhappy.”), then the fieldwork (500+ interviews), evidently a case of projection. The 33-year-old Zeke is director of a non-profit created to promote the Midwest’s cultural self-esteem. It’s based in Madison, Wis., and is dependent on federal dollars; but now, in 2008, the cupboard is bare. Zeke’s personal life is topsy-turvy. His father died right after 9/11; his brother Cougar enlisted, only to die in Iraq; Cougar’s fiancée Melody died driving drunk, leaving behind twin daughters. And what of his wife’s death? This is mentioned in passing, a teaser, part of that mischief; the full story emerges slowly. The silver lining is that Melody’s adorable 7-year-olds now live with Zeke, balm for a lonely widower who drinks too much. Zeke’s raising them, helped by his mother, when his world is rocked again by the news that she’s dying of lung cancer. There’s a will. Zeke must marry to retain custody of the girls (more mischief). With his professional life falling apart (sinister federal bureaucrats are auditing him), Zeke must find a mate, fast. What about Minn, the sexy Starbucks barista? Or Elizabeth, his single parent neighbor? Or even Lara, his last employee? With impressive sleight-of-hand, Bakopoulos combines tragedy and farce (a naked Lara threatens to Taser Zeke after he invades her home); the backdrop is “this dreadful reign of George W. Bush.” Through it all, Zeke makes for a good companion, alternately clueless (about his mother) and perceptive (about our “self-referential” Facebook culture).
A dark entertainment infused by a bluesy yearning for a better America.Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-15-101344-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
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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 Elin Hilderbrand ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2015
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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