Enough glimpses of the familiar to make a skin-crawling read. In spite of the taboos being flaunted, this is a remarkable...
Ever true to his transgressive muse, Cooper opens another shop of horrors suitable to follow his five-novel cycle (Period, 2000, etc.), here coupling sexually involved teenaged brothers with a post-Columbine world skanky enough to strike dread into the heart of any parent of adolescents.
Larry, tormented and confused, thinks he has killed his best buddy Rand with a single punch delivered because his friend seemed to have a thing for his younger brother Jim. Guilt drives him, a year later, to use the punch again, this time to fulfill a contract taken out on a schoolmate—pimped to gays by his mother and slashed by her for her own pleasure—who’s not really keen to live anyway, then buries the boy near the family vacation cabin of his girlfriend Jude. Confusion—about his relationships with Jim, Rand, and his drunken rival Pete—sours his relationship with Jude, whom he suspects of fooling around with Pete. But uncertainty about his sexual identity goes much deeper: Larry also tries to fool around with Pete, takes another male friend on a “date” only to beat him up and let the school’s leading Nazi rape him, and visits the teenaged daughter of his therapist in her bedroom, all the while trying to parse just what is going on between him and Jim. Whatever it is, Jim seems to be on top. Larry learns that he didn’t kill Rand, that in fact Rand committed suicide, and that the other boy he thought he’d killed was actually strangled by Pete. But instead of making him feel better, the news has the result of impelling him to shoot his cancer-ridden dad and drunken mom in their living room—while Jim is on the phone with his therapist.
Enough glimpses of the familiar to make a skin-crawling read. In spite of the taboos being flaunted, this is a remarkable portrait of a soul in hell.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-84195-274-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
Sometimes funny, sometimes silly, sometimes quite sad—i.e., an accurate portrait of life in one's 50s.
The further adventures of Candace and her man-eating friends.
Bushnell (Killing Monica, 2015, etc.) has been mining the vein of gold she hit with Sex and the City (1996) in both adult and YA novels. The current volume, billed as fiction but calling its heroine Candace rather than Carrie, is a collection of commentaries and recounted hijinks (and lojinks) close in spirit to the original. The author tries Tinder on assignment for a magazine, explores "cubbing" (dating men in their 20s who prefer older women), investigates the "Mona Lisa" treatment (a laser makeover for the vagina), and documents the ravages of Middle Aged Madness (MAM, the female version of the midlife crisis) on her clique of friends, a couple of whom come to blows at a spa retreat. One of the problems of living in Madison World, as she calls her neighborhood in the city, is trying to stay out of the clutches of a group of Russians who are dead-set on selling her skin cream that costs $15,000. Another is that one inevitably becomes a schlepper, carrying one's entire life around in "handbags the size of burlap sacks and worn department store shopping bags and plastic grocery sacks....Your back ached and your feet hurt, but you just kept on schlepping, hoping for the day when something magical would happen and you wouldn't have to schlep no more." She finds some of that magic by living part-time in a country place she calls the Village (clearly the Hamptons), where several of her old group have retreated. There, in addition to cubs, they find SAPs, Senior Age Players, who are potential candidates for MNB, My New Boyfriend. Will Candace get one?
Sometimes funny, sometimes silly, sometimes quite sad—i.e., an accurate portrait of life in one's 50s.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4726-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Chicana writer Castillo (whose reputation until now has been mostly regional) brings a warm, sometimes biting but not bitter feminist consciousness to the wondrous, tragic, and engaging lives of a New Mexico mother and her four fated daughters. Poor Sofi! Abandoned by her gambler husband to raise four unusual girls who tend to rise from adversity only to find disaster. ``La Loca,'' dead at age three, comes back to life—but is unable to bear the smell of human beings; Esperanza succeeds as a TV anchorwoman—but is less successful with her exploitative lover and disappears during the Gulf War; promiscuous, barhopping Caridad—mutilated and left for dead—makes a miraculous recovery, but her life on earth will still be cut short by passion; and the seemingly self-controlled Fe is so efficient that ``even when she lost her mind [upon being jilted]...she did it without a second's hesitation.'' Sofi's life-solution is to found an organization M.O.M.A.S. (Mothers of Martyrs and Saints), while Castillo tries to solve the question of minority-writer aesthetics: Should a work of literature provide a mirror for marginalized identity? Should it celebrate and preserve threatened culture? Should it be politically progressive? Should the writer aim for art, social improvement, or simple entertainment? Castillo tries to do it all—and for the most part succeeds. Storytelling skills and humor allow Castillo to integrate essaylike folklore sections (herbal curing, saint carving, cooking)—while political material (community organizing, toxic chemicals, feminism, the Gulf War) is delivered with unabashed directness and usually disarming charm.
Pub Date: April 17, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03490-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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