A very thin first novel-of-manners with some tepid social satire—all about an overrefined homosexual on the fringes of the theater world who falls in love and rooms with a man who's straight. The light tone here is neither quite comic nor very engaging. Martin, six feet five with ``a perfect combination of raised blue veins'' spelling the letter ``M'' on his right foot, feels he's destined to meet a man whose name also begins with ``M.'' On such a slight thread Green tries to spin out a social comedy. Martin's friend Stella introduces him to Matt, and Martin, ``an excellent, entirely self-taught cook,'' takes the day off from work to make dinner. Meanwhile, the reader has to buy into Martin's whimsical flight through and from life: he sees ``his life as a fiction,'' grew up rich, and is always trapped into ``wanting something impossible'' and feeling ``threatened and mesmerized by beautiful people.'' Such is the case with Matt when Martin discovers, during dinner, that his guest is straight. While Green develops the textures of Martin's life—impossible mother, his theater friends—Matt turns up again, needing a place to stay. Martin gets Matt involved in theater and teaches him the ropes (the difference between a condo and a co-op, for instance), while Matt does drugs and runs through a string of women. Martin is meant to be an endearing neurotic, but his shenanigans and frets wear thin very quickly, and by the time he has understood his life to be a ``Chinese water torture'' and fallen into the river only to be saved by a stranger's ``random act of love'' and to recover in time for an upbeat ending, the reader could care less. A sitcom posing as a novel about a person who is hardly there.
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-345-37470-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
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
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