Wing, no stranger to clunky phrasing (Stacey and her housekeeper sit “reasonably companionably”), nevertheless has good fun...
An effective, if not wholly original first novel, about the shark-infested waters of Hollywood—and that would be mostly lady sharks.
It’s the end of 2001 and nice girl Stacey is preparing for Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s staff farewell party. What begins as a celebratory evening ends with a bombshell: the conglomerate her fiancé works for has acquired a movie company and they’re moving to Los Angeles. It shouldn’t be too bad—a house in Beverly Hills, year-round sunshine, a happy husband—but for this independent New York girl, all she can imagine is the worst, and as luck would have it, that’s what she gets. The main obstacle between Stacey and happiness is Julia and Simon Mallis, the old owners of Pacificus. Kept on as consultants until the end of the next year, they begin waging war at Jamey and Stacey’s New York wedding (they rearrange the seating cards and take over as the entertainment). With Sun Tzu’s The Art of War in hand, Simon intends to have it all—cash from the company’s buyout and a hands-on role in its running. Unfortunately the battle moves to the home front and Stacey is the sole combatant. Wing skewers the absurdities of Hollywood life, and there is an abundance of raw material: charity benefits for odd diseases (helping excessively sweaty children is the cause du jour), daily color consultations (one wouldn’t want to show up at the Polo Lounge in chartreuse when clearly it’s a magenta day) and the oh-so-necessary study of Kabbalah. Stacey’s new social circle of Hollywood wives live a sad, parasitic life; their sole source of accomplishment is in one-upping each other in designer goods and plastic surgery. When Jamey and Stacey discover their house has been bugged, Stacey hatches a plan that will finally rid them of the comically malevolent Simon and Julia.
Wing, no stranger to clunky phrasing (Stacey and her housekeeper sit “reasonably companionably”), nevertheless has good fun with the wackiness of Hollywood lives.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-156824-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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
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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