From lack of plot to banal dialogue, everything indicates that Hardy has squeezed the last drop out of this provender.
This wisp of a novel is the sixth and final volume in Hardy’s B-Boy Blues series, about two gay black men and their friends and families.
The action, what there is of it, extends over four days in June 2003. It’s been ten years since Mitchell and Raheim became lovers, and four since they broke up. Now, Mitchell is freelancing as a journalist while raising two kids in his Brooklyn brownstone. Errol, one of them, is Raheim’s son (abandoned by him) and about to turn 15. Five-year-old Destiny is the daughter of Mitchell’s mother, thus actually Mitchell’s sister, except that his mother, at 49, decided she was too old to raise another kid, although she’s happy as a loving “grandmother.” Unusual arrangements, but the house runs like clockwork thanks to Mitchell’s expert care. And suddenly everything is coming up roses. Mitchell gets a fabulous job offer as editor in chief of the magazine he’d earlier parted from bitterly (it’s under new ownership). Raheim is on a roll, too. He’s kicked his gambling addiction, with the help of Gamblers Anonymous, and is living harmoniously with his father. He also gets a fabulous offer after a long dry spell—the lead in a movie about a gay ballplayer. And Errol, smart as a whip, is already being courted by Ivy League schools. In what amounts to a long curtain call, some old faces put in appearances. B.D. and Babyface are moving to Canada, where they’ll have a legal marriage. Raheim’s nemesis, Malice, is his nasty old self. Mitchell’s old flame, Montee Simms, is still a sweetheart. Except for Malice, nobody speaks a harsh work in this lovefest. Errol, for example, has forgiven Raheim, just as Raheim has forgiven his dad. The message? Well, “Love is always worth it.” The sweetness is cloying, though the inevitable reconciliation between Mitchell and Raheim is nicely understated.
From lack of plot to banal dialogue, everything indicates that Hardy has squeezed the last drop out of this provender.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-621249-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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