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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
