A skillfully crafted and entertaining cautionary tale.
Three young New York gossip columnists face tough personal and professional choices while chronicling the decadent misadventures of the rich and famous.
Holding tight to idealistic dreams of becoming an investigative journalist, 22-year-old Kate Simon has mixed feelings when she takes an entry-level job reporting on parties for the New York Examiner. These early reservations take a back seat, however, as the ingénue finds herself seduced by instant access to the kind of events her peers could only dream of. She discovers unlikely allies in rival columnists Tim and Blake, who take her under their boozy wings and initiate her into their dizzying underworld of sex and drugs, where “items” are scribbled on cocktail napkins, and juicy info is traded, or held, for favors. Tabloid nightlife fixture Tim is a sexy, cynical bad boy who occupies himself with an endless stream of model/actresses, also known as “mattresses” until he meets Kate’s stunning friend Zoe, a rich girl who shares his hard-partying ways. Their romance appears doomed, though, when one of Tim’s former conquests comes forward claiming to be pregnant with his baby, fueling his self-destructive tendencies. Unlike habitually broke Tim, trust-fund preppy Blake chooses to work, earning the thinly veiled contempt of his media-hating banker dad, who thinks his son should write features. But when his father is investigated for financial improprieties involving expensive paintings, Blake finally sees an opportunity to be useful to his family, if his friends don’t scoop the story first. Meanwhile, Kate falls for talented and media-savvy chef Marco Mancini, but finds herself wondering if the restaurateur genuinely cares for her, or is using her connection to keep his own past secret. Soon enough, Kate comes to see the vacuous world she covers as a dead end dressed up in gift bags and free meals. Sharply written and peppered with authentic detail and boldface names, this witty debut from journalist Schoeneman sags only slightly with a too-obvious message on the ultimate emptiness of the pursuit of fame.
A skillfully crafted and entertaining cautionary tale.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-23746-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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
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
PERSPECTIVES
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