A lovingly detailed excavation of a failed marriage—and of several damaged lives. It's becoming clear that Casey (the NBAwinning Spartina, 1989, etc.) is at heart a domestic novelist, fascinated by the waxing and waning of American marriages and careers. His latest, set largely in and around Charlottesville, from the late '70s to the present, traces the decline of Mike and Joss's partnership. He's a lawyer, Joss is an artist, and their lives, at first, seem relatively serene. Mike is the more sanguine of the two, believing that ``marriage had an independent soul. . . . that most problems could be solved by waiting, that there was a natural stabilizing grace which would sooner or later reach them.'' It's possibly because of this belief that he's slow to understand Joss's restlessness, or anticipate what will happen when she strikes up an increasingly intimate friendship with a friend's fiancÇe. When Joss finally leaves Mike for a woman, it's not only their marriage that unravels: Their comfortable circle of friends, a bright, liberal, accomplished group of strivers, is shredded by the resulting fallout. Matters become worse when Mike agrees to run for a congressional seat, in an attempt to reassert his competence and talent, his mastery of the world. The campaign soon goes humiliatingly awry. Watching all of this with increasing exasperation and disbelief are Joss and Mike's two unsparingly perceptive daughters, Edith and Nora. Casey's very precise prose, and his mastery of the time and place, keep the plot percolating. And few write so believably about truly bright people, or about the dense particulars of family life. But the narrative, while never dull, often seems too luxuriantly detailed, too filled with minor incidents and fleeting conversations. Casey is far too wise to attempt to turn one marriage into a metaphor for American ills, but without some overarching theme the work seems somewhat exhausting, and obsessively focused. Still, it's undoubtedly a moving work, and often in its portrait of intelligent people haplessly adrift, a convincing one. (First printing of 50,000)
Pub Date: March 25, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-40978-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
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
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