For readers with a high enough threshold for meandering diatribes to make it to the end, answers to certain questions—e.g.,...
The latest creation from Sutton (Thong Nation, 2006, etc.) is a mad man in a mad world, obsessed with brand names and luxury but furious with cheap materialism and shallowness of life in London as the credit crisis of 2008 unfolds.
When he isn’t wooing women who want nothing to do with him, Matt harangues retail clerks and managers as he attempts to return shoes, luggage, designer eyewear and other ill-advised purchases that he goes from fervently desiring to deeming faulty. He’s having cash-flow problems which he attempts to remedy by offering friends and family further “investment opportunities” in a murky business scheme he’s hatching with the North Koreans. Dumped by yet another girlfriend, Matt turns from disturbed to unhinged—his rambling internal rant follows increasingly sinister misadventures punctuated by ominous gaps in which the women he encounters, spies on and stalks disappear. Consumed with ire with others’ excess and jealousy over their seemingly endless credit, while he, broke and bashed-up by violent incidents that are never fully elucidated is forced to cadge free meals from the friends and associates he compulsively mistreats and to steal cheap wine, he spirals downward into a paranoid, self-destructive loop. His narrative becomes elliptical and contradictory, rife with nonsensical digressions and digressions within digressions, usually on his purchase history and feelings on design, style and the lack of integrity in name-brand products. Very little happens, although there is a sort of progress to his decay. An image, contradictory to his deluded self-image and fantasy-life, begins to emerge from glimpses of his reflection and others’ shock and disgust at his increasingly bruised and scratched face, his wonky glasses and disheveled demeanor. Meant to be a satire, what little humor there is in his absurd turns of mind and in the juxtaposition of his delusional rants and pathetic reality soon wears thin, with little support from the weak plot and meandering language. But are Matt’s murderous thoughts just thoughts?
For readers with a high enough threshold for meandering diatribes to make it to the end, answers to certain questions—e.g., what’s actually going on with Matt? will he ever manage to escape to North Korea?—aren’t much of a reward, given the larger question posed by a lack of story, entertainment or meaning: Who cares?Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60945-007-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Thoroughbreds and Virginia blue-bloods cavort, commit murder, and fall in love in Roberts's (Hidden Riches, 1994, etc.) latest romantic thriller — this one set in the world of championship horse racing. Rich, sheltered Kelsey Byden is recovering from a recent divorce when she receives a letter from her mother, Naomi, a woman she has believed dead for over 20 years. When Kelsey confronts her genteel English professor father, though, he sheepishly confesses that, no, her mother isn't dead; throughout Kelsey's childhood, she was doing time for the murder of her lover. Kelsey meets with Naomi and not only finds her quite charming, but the owner of Three Willows, one of the most splendid horse farms in Virginia. Kelsey is further intrigued when she meets Gabe Slater, a blue-eyed gambling man who owns a neighboring horse farm; when one of Gabe's horses is mated with Naomi's, nostrils flare, flanks quiver, and the romance is on. Since both Naomi and Gabe have horses entered in the Kentucky Derby, Kelsey is soon swept into the whirlwind of the Triple Crown, in spite of her family's objections to her reconciliation with the notorious Naomi. The rivalry between the two horse farms remains friendly, but other competitors — one of them is Gabe's father, a vicious alcoholic who resents his son's success — prove less scrupulous. Bodies, horse and human, start piling up, just as Kelsey decides to investigate the murky details of her mother's crime. Is it possible she was framed? The ground is thick with no-goods, including haughty patricians, disgruntled grooms, and jockeys with tragic pasts, but despite all the distractions, the identity of the true culprit behind the mayhem — past and present — remains fairly obvious. The plot lopes rather than races to the finish. Gambling metaphors abound, and sexual doings have a distinctly equine tone. But Roberts's style has a fresh, contemporary snap that gets the story past its own worst excesses.
Pub Date: June 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14059-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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