Robinson's seventh book is a New Hollywood sequel to Perdido (1978) in which the follies of the older generation continue to provide the best dirt. Recalled from London to L.A. by the drive-by shooting of her best friend, journalist Kate Alder Stone, Alexandra Zachary, normally happy heading her independent production company abroad, can't help chafing under the news that Victor Levanin International (VLI), the studio her great-grandfather founded and his heirs grandly squandered, is once again on the block. Alex's need to share the news of Kate's death with her lifelong love, Oscared leading man King Ryder, has already put him back in her Rolodex again. Also back in her life, if not between her sheets, is her despicable ex Rick Stone, powerful head of rival studio SMS, the man she married on the rebound from King's marriage, and the one who left her with a precocious daughter but not a single good memory. When Rick confirms the rumor that he's the leading suitor for VLI, Alex grows determined to outbid his billion- dollar offer, even though it means going hat in hand to her remote parents, her buddies in the business, and her actress friend Polo Montana's husband Baron Solder Task, the German Ted Turner. But how can Alex ever raise all that money in time to beat Rick when there are so many limos to take, so many childhood traumas to recall, so many pithy apothegms about Old Hollywood to recycle (``You knew if you had presence by five. By seven you were on to your best angles. . . .''), so many names to drop with a clatter (``You had an amazing childhood; you met the Kennedys, Paul Newman, Toni Morrison, Martin Luther King, danced with Gene Kelly. . . . You've been in the greatest private projection rooms in the world'')? Kate's death, by the way, will turn out to be no casual accident, unlike almost everything else in this gaspingly star- struck dinosaur, whose DNA seems to have been preserved in amber ever since the studio era.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-449-90861-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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