Patton keeps the pot boiling briskly in the deceptively laid-back manner of Elmore Leonard, but his real gift is to get...
Max Travis, the white-knight ADA of Portland, Oregon, is in big trouble this time, and it’s all his fault.
Max (The Shake, 2000) doesn’t think he’s in trouble, of course. Max thinks he’s in love. The twice-divorced workaholic, who’s just been dumped by his old professional rival, defense attorney Paige Prescott, has caught the eye of hairstylist Dana Waverleigh just as his friend Bill Roop was splitting up with her, and he’s fallen hard. After one night together he can hear bells ringing; after three dates they’re talking about marriage and children; after two weeks Max feels as if he’s known her forever. But he hasn’t, or he’d know that in addition to her three husbands, she’s been with a man who fathered one of her daughters and, more recently and disastrously, with Jack Nitzl, the underhanded used-car dealer who, inspired by her offhand remark about the home safe where Roop keeps the take from his bar, has staged a home invasion together with cranked-up body-shop owner Nicky Bortolotti—who, surprised to see Roop entertaining retired basketball player Highwire Harris and not that crazy about African-Americans anyway, has capped the evening by shooting the athlete. It gets worse. Jack, catching a glimpse of Dana as he flees the scene, threatens to give her up to the cops as a willing co-conspirator unless she feeds him information on every move Max is making. And Nicky, for whom personal loyalty is a lot less important than his next fix, is getting more and more impatient with anybody he thinks might be onto him.
Patton keeps the pot boiling briskly in the deceptively laid-back manner of Elmore Leonard, but his real gift is to get inside his driven characters—from sky-high Nicky to basically nice Dana to Max, dazed by a love too good to be true—and evoke the energy and frequent sweetness behind their improbable ardor.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30649-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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