by Kate Christensen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 2004
First-rate adult entertainment, as they say, and Christensen’s most impressive yet.
A suave ego-/erotomaniac more than half in love with easeful death.
Protagonist and narrator of Christensen’s mordantly amusing third novel (following Jeremy Thrane, 2001) is Hugo Whittier, the 40-year-old black-sheep scion of a wealthy Upstate New York family, who records in several “notebooks” his retreat to the unkempt Whittier mansion Waverley (named for Sir Walter Scott’s novel), after itinerant years as a “kept boy” in Europe and America, among other immoralities. Also a self-taught gourmet cook and incorrigible gourmand, Hugo persists in living well, despite suffering from Buerger’s disease, a painful and incurable condition rendered lethal by cigarette smoking—another of the many pleasures he refuses to relinquish. Hugo’s hermetic (and hermitic) paradise is gradually infested by snakes: first, his older brother Dennis, an underachieving sculptor discarded by his wife Marie (a forthright psychotherapist), then by his estranged wife Sonia and (so she claims) his ten-year-old daughter Bellatrix. Meanwhile, Hugo is worming his way into Marie’s social graces; subtly romancing her teenaged au pair Louisa; considering the sexual potential of Marie’s uptight younger sister “Vero”(nica); flirting meaningfully with cheerful slut-waitress Carla, and frolicking in motel rooms with ripe matron Stephanie Fox, in retreat from her hypochondriac pedophile husband and stalled in an intended affair with Dennis (remember him?). Furthermore, Hugo is being stalked by (supposedly retired) hit man Shlomo Levy, engaged to waste him by a former lover on whom Hugo had cheated with a Swedish exchange student. These delirious complications, and many others, are related in a rakish voice further accented by Hugo’s delighted perusal of Montaigne’s essays and the savory prose of “food writer” (and, he feels, kindred spirit) M.F.K. Fisher. Hugo’s introverted love of his own cleverness can be wearying, but Christensen’s inventive plot keeps the reader happily hooked.
First-rate adult entertainment, as they say, and Christensen’s most impressive yet.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2004
ISBN: 0-7679-1030-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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BOOK REVIEW
by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
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
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