Gross gets many emotional details about marriage and the intensity of mother-love right, but she milks her trendy issues to...
Gross (Getting Out, 2002, etc.) pits working mother versus stay-at-home mother in yet another fiction about women’s ambivalent struggle to combine work and family.
Amanda and her lawyer husband Aaron move from Manhattan to the New Jersey suburbs shortly before their baby Malena is born. When a tree falls on their house during a storm, their neighbor Thea and her rock-solid husband Caius invite them to stay in their house. Grateful for Thea’s generous hospitality, Amanda is intimidated by her graceful competence as a housewife and mother. Thea, who has never worked while raising her three children, is jealous and resentful of Amanda for having a new infant to love. Although Amanda senses Thea’s disapproval of her decision to return to work as a book editor, desperation drives Amanda to hire Thea as a babysitter. The women distrust each other yet feel drawn toward friendship. One Friday after a near disaster, they share a kiss of affectionate relief that is vaguely sexual. The following Monday, Thea, uncomfortable with the kiss and afraid she’s growing overly attached to Malena, quits as babysitter. The women’s friendship sours. When dead animals start appearing on Thea’s doorstep, she suspects and eventually accuses Amanda. Thea clings to her hostility even after Amanda and Aaron rescue Thea’s daughter Carra, who has seriously injured herself while trespassing in their yard. Finally, an Outward Bound trip for Thea, as well as Aaron’s close call on 9/11, give Thea and Amanda a sense of perspective. The narration moves back and forth between the two women. Neither recognizes the other’s insecurity, each is jealous of the other, but the balance of sympathy is weighted toward neurotic Jewish Amanda, who has a sense of humor about her shortcomings that uptight Episcopalian Thea lacks.
Gross gets many emotional details about marriage and the intensity of mother-love right, but she milks her trendy issues to didactic death.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-35292-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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
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
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