This comedy about political insiders is surprisingly cheerless and weirdly apolitical.
From Close (The Smart One, 2013), a beach read for the election season about the friendship of two women whose husbands work in the Obama White House.
In 2009, narrator Beth reluctantly leaves New York for Washington, D.C., when her politically ambitious lawyer husband, Matt, takes a job in the White House counsel’s office. Beth is lonely and generally miserable until she and Matt meet Ashleigh Dillon and her husband, Jimmy, who works in the White House travel office, at a birthday party for another staffer. Despite her evangelical and artsy-craftsy leanings, Texan Ashleigh, who calls herself Ash in D.C., and Beth become intensely close friends, as do their husbands. But over the next four years, charismatic, easygoing Jimmy easily rises from one post to the next better one while diligent, hardworking Matt becomes increasingly frustrated as his work proves less interesting than he'd hoped. After the second inauguration, Matt is thrilled when approached to run for office in Maryland to fill a vacating seat, but his hopes are dashed when the incumbent decides to run again. The Dillons move back to Texas, where Jimmy is soon tapped to run for Texas Railroad Commissioner. Matt is excited when Jimmy asks him to manage his campaign, and Beth is game to try out Texas, but as soon as they move into the Dillons’ mansion in a wealthy Houston suburb, the couples’ relationships begin to show schisms: Jimmy and Matt grow increasingly hostile as the campaign falters; a preoccupied Matt doesn’t give Beth the attention she wants; Jimmy doesn’t help Ash with their baby; Beth has trouble relating to Ash, who has reverted to Ashleigh in name and personality; and then there’s that sexual tension between Jimmy and Beth—although, as usual, Close’s depictions of troubled marriages are less interesting than her explorations of troubled friendships. Beth's tone veers between snark and whine, and to make matters worse, she couldn't care less about politics.
This comedy about political insiders is surprisingly cheerless and weirdly apolitical.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87561-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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