Though his tale runs out of steam as completely as the Dukakis campaign toward the end, the delight Frank (The Columnist,...
Just in time for Election Year, a wickedly funny account of the aimless lives of Beltway losers caught up in the events leading up to the 1988 Dukakis-Bush slugfest.
Charlie Dingleman, who still dreams of his six years as a Pennsylvania Congressman, has been put out to pasture at Thingeld, Pine & Sconce. His second wife, Eve DeFole, is a law student obviously on her way up and out. His brainy, prickly junior associate at TP&S, Judith Grust, seems headed in the same direction. And suddenly so does Charlie, his name nosed about for a White House job—until he allows himself an unfortunate glance and an ill-advised jest at a lunch with Judith, who promptly sets out to bury him deep. It won’t do Charlie any good to consult the image consultants at the Big Tooth PR firm, because they’re just as feckless as he is. Account executive Candy Romulade dithers over her “action plan” for Charlie while Rome burns, and her friend Teresa Maracopulous is too completely trapped in a dead-end assistant’s job and a dead-end marriage to a husband who actually loves her to bestir herself to any useful task. Meanwhile, exiled liberal Hank Morriday, Judith’s sometime lover, struggles with his book on welfare reform while he enviously eyes his opposite number, a rising star in the Dukakis campaign. What brings this ship of fools to unforgettable life is Frank’s heartlessly deadpan way of deflating their most cherished desires, from their petty scrabbling for 15 minutes of fame to their hilariously untitillating couplings (as when Judith reflects tolerantly of an unappealing suitor that “she expended fewer calories on him than she would merely climbing onto her exercise machine”).
Though his tale runs out of steam as completely as the Dukakis campaign toward the end, the delight Frank (The Columnist, 2001) takes in skewering his crafty nincompoops is infectious, evergreen.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4776-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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
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
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