Nicholson’s sometimes-sharp lines don’t make up for thin characters, worn subjects, and a way-too-clever narrative construct.
Pretentious comic novel about a London doctor who can’t escape a life that’s too much like a bad movie.
Having satirized the literary world in Bedlam Burning (2002), the prolific Nicholson here turns his eye on Los Angeles and Hollywood, doing so by intertwining three narratives. The first follows William Draper through squalid 17th-century London as he seeks to mate a dodo and thus preserve an endangered species. The other two, set in present-day LA, concern, first, Rick McCartney, a would-be auteur who wants to film a screenplay about dodos, which, it eventually turns out, consists of the Draper tale. Flying into LA, McCartney has a panic attack and seeks treatment from another passenger, Dr. Henry Cadwallader, the subject of the third narrative. The doctor accompanies his daughter Dorothy, who is heading to a screen test. Cadwallader expresses a wearying disdain for just about everything and everyone, particularly movie clichés, and, unsurprisingly, he finds his experience in LA taking the shape of a tawdry B-movie. As Dorothy flunks her bid for stardom, he kills time playing the part of a house-hunter, thereby getting involved with a real-estate agent who’s really a failed actress. Cadwallader’s acting and demeanor so fascinate the talent agent who rejected Dorothy that the agent insists he go into movies. So does Rick, who casts the doctor in his film of the Draper story. A porn star, Rick, Dorothy, the real-estate agent, and a mechanical dodo end up poolside at a fake Tudor mansion, all of them running around “like headless chickens (or dodos).” The point, according to the real-estate agent: “Everybody in this town is pretending to be something they’re not.”
Nicholson’s sometimes-sharp lines don’t make up for thin characters, worn subjects, and a way-too-clever narrative construct.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5779-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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