A follow-up to 1993's endearing Everything Looks Impressive, with a whiplash funny sprint through the merciless memory of the late-1980s overstuffed art scene. Kennedy's book might well have been titled Everything Looks Impressive, but Not for Long. Why? Because in the burgeoning career of recent Princeton grad Fred Layton, the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash is right around the corner. Not that Fred's new employer, unscrupulous art dealer and all-around nouveau riche reptile Nelson Albright, gives a hoot. This, after all, is a man who owes Sotheby's millions. Promised by Albright that he'll be a millionaire by the time he's 30, Fred settles into indentured servitude at Albright's Boston gallery, contending with the boss's tidal caprices, sidestepping the plots of a backstabbing fellow salesman, developing jaundiced art-world versions of collegiality and friendship, and struggling—peripherally—with his homosexuality. While wooing several major clients, including a former cocaine trafficker and a wealthy North Carolina society matron, Fred learns how to lie through his teeth, improvise art history, and pass off damaged prints as rare art. He even gets picked up by a luscious Texas antiques dealer, but he fails to muster the gumption to betray the supremely self-interested Albright. After the crash, Albright's already shaky finances undergo a full-fledged assault from a rival dealer, Oksana Outka, who raids her main competitor's clientele and schemes to have Albright exiled from the art world. Fred makes a hobby of rescuing Albright from the abyss, but the flamboyant gallerist's abusive, blowtorch personality leaves Fred dreaming of escape, and the action concludes with a memorable confrontation at a Sotheby's auction. Kennedy showcases a talent for deft plotting, wonderfully bitchy dialogue, and for savage caricature, memorably rendering the hypermoneyed as a pack of jackals mistaking the smell of dollars for good taste. A droll, madcap, witty, downright old-fashioned romp that mixes dynamite satire with featherweight tragedy. Kennedy was one to watch. Now he's one to wait for.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-47736-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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