It’s not where the perpetually tipsy (or drunk) heroine ends up, but her journey that’s the most astute—and most...
Fearing she’s about to lose her secretary job, a woman trails her boss to Hawaii for a blackmailing opportunity—leverage to avoid potential termination—in Taylor’s debut comedy.
Calyssa Pantaleo’s inability to get along with Babette Hooks at Shred Unread in New York may have detrimental repercussions. Babette, secretary to CEO Mr. Grunt (the reputed philanderer’s nickname), spreads rumors that Calyssa’s bedding co-workers, including boss Adam Klutz. This leads to a bathroom scuffle, followed by Calyssa photoshopping Babette’s head onto a gorilla and inadvertently printing hundreds of copies for everyone to see. Mr. Grunt’s email requesting a Monday meeting convinces Calyssa he’s firing her after the weekend. So she redirects the Las Vegas trip with pals Chloe Tenderfoot and Natalia Romanova to Honolulu, where vacationing Adam has been ignoring her calls. If Calyssa can blackmail Adam (with nude pictures, perhaps?), he’ll have no choice but to fight for her job. Bringing along newly homeless Lindsay Goldplenty, the women soon realize that getting evidence of Adam cheating at a masquerade ball is not so easy. Natalia, for one, drunk at their New York departure, is upset they’re not in Vegas because she had a personal reason to be there. Add to that a possibly stolen wallet and Calyssa will need all the help and apple martinis she can get. The author packs a lot into the story, from a theme of women’s unfair treatment in the workplace (exclusively male company bigwigs) to absurdist comedy (Calyssa’s ridiculous plan). But the most intriguing facet is Calyssa herself, a generally unlikable protagonist who manages to garner sympathy, albeit slowly. Her first-person narrative, for example, designates names for people superficially, like Pug for a waitress with a “yippity-yappety” voice. But even if the martini lover doesn’t recognize her own flaws, she listens when someone points them out: Chloe asserts that Calyssa blames others for her problems. Identity metaphors are occasionally too blatant: a lost ID or using someone else’s; wearing masks at the ball with Halloween coming up. Some, however, are sublime, particularly transgendered Natalia, who’s preop but unquestionably “one of the girls.”
It’s not where the perpetually tipsy (or drunk) heroine ends up, but her journey that’s the most astute—and most facetious—aspect of this tale.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5170-9557-4
Page Count: 394
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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