Reedian thoughts about life, marriage, middle age, and children when three couples, their kids, and a close friend spend the summer lumped together in a New England farmhouse. As Kit Craig, Reed wrote the richly stylized psychothriller Gone (1992). This is both Reed's most ambitious novel and her slowest, plowing along like, say, To the Lighthouse—though without Virginia Woolf's prose. What the couples, and the reader, don't know at first is that fine-minded, houseproud Leslie, nonworking wife of the very successful writer Chad, has suckered the whole aging crew into this summer ``idyllness'' so that she can carry on her affair with one of the husbands, which she's doing in response to Chad's infidelity. All's sportive to start, but summer's lease hath all too brief a term to spend, and by midsummer great cracks appear that lead to despair and tragedy. Reed's storytelling attracts once one gets used to it: Each chapter is in a different character's voice, including group voices as well (``the kids'' and so on). Among the players are very rich adman Calvin, immensely jealous of Chad's literary success, and his squashy, plump wife Jane, mother of Rocky and the monstrously hyper little Alfred. Then there's Chad and Leslie's oversensitive boy Timothy, called Lucky, who feels terribly weird entering adolescence. Others are pottery-making Polly and horror-movie writer Zack, as well as Stig, whose wife Roseann has fled, leaving him with their pubescent daughter Speedy. There are a few more nuts and raisins, but the suspense hangs on the question of who's sleeping with whom and what everyone is thinking about aging, parenthood, mortality, etc. These thoughts pile up like padding toward the end, just when you want the climax to take off without the author getting in the way. Terrific takes on time's rush, with a touch of that personal enlightenment offered to a certain generation of moviegoers by The Big Chill—but less glib.
Pub Date: March 22, 1996
ISBN: 0-87451-746-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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