Even the zingers have less zing than in Frank’s first two send-ups (Bad Publicity, 2004, etc.) in this hit-and-miss snapshot...
Washington, 2000–2001: Beltway socialites fiddle while D.C. burns in Frank’s third satiric soufflé.
By the spring of 2000, everyone’s sick of Bill Clinton because everyone’s heard every possible joke about semen-stained dresses. Nonpareil hostess Trudy Hopedale (née Weinstein, as her catty, delusional mother-in-law keeps reminding her and everyone else in earshot) is more than ready for a change, even if that involves transferring her decorous carnal interests from her husband Roger, a Foreign Service veteran with a promising future behind him, to wheezing Midwestern Republican Senator Ricardo Willingham. Trudy’s sedate husband has turned from soft-hitting analyses of the paradox of American hegemony to a softcore novel, Desks of Power, which embarrasses everyone who reads it and may end up embarrassing more highly placed politicians as well. Though he isn’t ready to respond to rapacious Washington Post reporter Jennifer Pouch’s forthright pass, Trudy’s dear, dear friend and co-narrator Donald Frizzé is ready for a change of his own—perhaps a switch from his current project, a biography of Garret Augustus Hobart, William McKinley’s vice president, to a volume on some equally pivotal vice president. Change comes to town as the Clintons depart and the Bushes arrive. But as the country lurches toward war with “some international foe (I didn’t quite get the foe’s name),” these genteel nincompoops chatter only of shark attacks, the sleazy congressman whose intern has vanished and their own endlessly fascinating sexual adventures and social snubs. The myopia of “ordinary people like me who find themselves in the vortex of history and destiny” is a wonderfully promising subject, but these self-perpetuating aristocrats, who can rarely muster enough sincerity even to equivocate, are such easy targets that the satire comes off as alternately too broad and just plain irrelevant.
Even the zingers have less zing than in Frank’s first two send-ups (Bad Publicity, 2004, etc.) in this hit-and-miss snapshot of the way we live now.Pub Date: July 17, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4924-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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