A tale with an excellent premise about art, identity, and relationships that hits a few stumbling blocks.
A troubled pop star crash-lands into the lives of two super-fans in this novel.
Twenty-nine-year-old Normandie Vine is one of the most famous people in the world, boasting several hit albums and a massive teenage fan base. But life in the spotlight is starting to suffocate her, and she’s developed a serious drug problem to cope with her existential ennui. After trashing her car while escaping paparazzi, Normandie checks into Peak Experience, a plush Colorado rehab center that provides little actual respite from tantalizing drugs, gawking fans, or the overbearing control of her agent, Myra Harp. A Klonopin-addled Normandie wanders out of the center soon after arriving, only to stumble onto the highway and climb into a parked car belonging to Fran and Trish Dunwoody, two teenage Normandie super-fans who have traveled from their rural hometown of Endeavor, Nebraska, to hold up supportive signs. Fran and Trish believe that a compassionate and anonymous environment will best help Normandie kick her habit, and abscond with her back to Endeavor. As Hollywood panics and Myra attempts to profit from Normandie’s dramatic disappearance, Trish and Fran move the star into their home with their Uncle Dave, who has cared for the sisters ever since their parents’ death. Normandie’s mental state is in and out—she first wakes up believing she’s 12—and Trish and Fran struggle to unlock the puzzle of the woman’s past while avoiding the notice of their small-town neighbors. Polman’s (Twinbill, 2016) premise allows room for both slapstick comedy and real feelings, though the dialogue’s tendency toward dated slang and zany exclamations mutes the story’s emotional heft (At one point, Fran gushes: “Of all the thousands of fans who were there, she picked us to rescue her! Isn’t that the coolest?”). Normandie’s abduction by the well-intentioned sisters (and their eventually complicit uncle) contains overtones of lies, ownership, and control similarly present in the relationship between the celebrity and her handlers, an intriguing parallel that feels underexplored in the name of portraying the Dunwoodys as innocent and likable. The ending relies on deux ex machina but still generates real empathy for Normandie’s ultimate reckoning with her past. The author’s writing style is enjoyably snappy but can gratingly overuse sentence fragments.
A tale with an excellent premise about art, identity, and relationships that hits a few stumbling blocks.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-97299-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Grassy Gutter Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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