This long, rich fiction, set mostly in Manhattan and Paris, concludes White's autobiographical trilogy—and falls somewhere in quality between the pellucid excellence of A Boy's Own Story (1983) and the mannered redundancy of its sequel, The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988). Here, the story of a generation—the one that originated the gay liberation movement in the late 1960s, then began dying out a few years later with the AIDS pandemic—is compressed into the remembered experiences of its narrator, a bereaved lover mourning the deaths and looking backward over 30 years' worth of sexual adventuring and slow progress toward maturity and success as a writer. White gives a good graphic picture of bohemian Paris in 1968, and elsewhere offers unusual perspectives on familiar locales (cruising at the Colosseum in Rome, observing ``Fire Island as an exact analogue of medieval Japan''). The novel's signal weakness is the sameness of the many, many men who wander in and out of the narrator's life (his recently deceased lover Brice is scarcely a character at all; on the other hand, Jamie, a sybaritic NYC ``blueblood,'' exhibits a cockeyed charisma that fully justifies the narrator's exasperated fascination with him). White writes plaintively about the disappointments of aging and losing one's sexual allure, and convincingly connects the decline of phallic power with the fear of literary senescence. If he's a bit smug about the mores and pleasures of being a gym rat, he writes vividly, and always amusingly, about the mechanics and etiquette of ``tricking.'' White's unmatched ability to communicate the tension between asserting one's right to be ``different'' and yearning to be accepted as ``normal'' is brilliantly displayed again. Nothing human is alien to him, and none of his alienated souls is anything less than achingly human. (First serial to the New Yorker; Book-of- the-Month selection)
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-43477-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
IN THE NEWS
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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