A dull and disjointed second effort from the self-described “Lit Chick.”
New York attorney concocts a strange theory to explain her dating slump.
Harmel (How to Sleep with a Movie Star, 2006) dredges up stock characters and well-tested plotlines in her second novel. Once again, an unmarried, successful, 30-year-old New Yorker struggles to find a man worthy of her time. Harper Roberts is an Ohio native who lands in New York to pursue her dream of becoming a patent lawyer. Apparently, Harper’s intellect is so razor-sharp that she leapfrogs her peers and becomes partner years ahead of schedule. Making partner at her firm kicks off the beginning of Harper’s dating dry spell; her live-in boyfriend moves out when he finds out Harper is out-earning him. Years pass, and somehow Harper manages to continually alienate the men she dates. In the midst of this romantic drought, she turns to her childhood friends Meg, Emmie and Jill (all fellow Ohio transplants) for help. Over cocktails, the girls decide to test out Harper’s theory: Men are threatened by successful women. Harper makes a pact to act and dress like a ditzy blonde cheerleader for a two-week period to see if her luck with men improves. According to the blonde theory, Harper should find more men to date if she downplays her achievements. While she does succeed in filling her calendar, all of the guys the “dumb” Harper attracts are egomaniacs looking for casual sex. In short, the theory is a flop; Harper continues to be alone and relatively miserable, and Harmel’s point in all this nonsense is lost. At least the female friendships come across as believable, as jealousy lurks beneath the surface when the marrieds and non-marrieds compare lives.
A dull and disjointed second effort from the self-described “Lit Chick.”Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2007
ISBN: 0-446-69759-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: 5 Spot/Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
With wit and poetry, Dunn redefines the limits of the acceptable.
Like a collaboration between John Irving and David Lynch, this audaciously conceived, sometimes shocking tale of love and hubris in a carnival family exerts the same mesmeric fascination as the freaks it depicts, despite essential structural flaws.
In language as original and fantastic as her story, Dunn (Attic, 1970; Truck, 1971) tells the tale of Binewski's Carnival Fabulon, an unremarkable traveling show until patriarch Aloysius decides to breed his own freaks. Using drugs, insecticides and radioactivity, Al and his wife Crystal Lil, sometime geek, produce Arturo, a thalidomide child; Elly and Iphy, beautiful Siamese twins; Olympia, the novel's narrator, an albino hunchbacked dwarf trained as a barker; and the outwardly normal but telekinetic Chick. With overtones of classical tragedy, Olympia relates Arturo's growing power: first over his sisters, who vie for his love, then over the entire show, and finally over the many followers of the cult of "Arturism," who, like their prophet, have pieces of themselves amputated to transcend appearance. (Arms and legs become lion food; hands and feet, fodder for "transcendental maggots," ironic souveniors of Arturo.) Arturo's pride and jealousy combine with the arrival of a failed assassin, now a freak himself, and with the twins' sideline of selling "norms" unique sex, to bring the show to a flaming end. Although the framing story—years later, Olympia schemes to save Miranda, her daughter by Arturo, from a perverse philanthropist—is poorly integrated, and the novel sometimes judders along, this is captivatingly original stuff.
With wit and poetry, Dunn redefines the limits of the acceptable.Pub Date: March 27, 1989
ISBN: 394-56902-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Come to think of it, this feels more like a factory product than a book as such—competent enough, and resembling a book in...
A high-toned neogothic yarn by veteran author Steel (Legacy, 2010, etc.), who owns the genre.
You’ve got to pity one-percenter, almost-septuagenerian Olivia Grayson, who runs a fashion and lifestyle-accessory empire called The Factory—“an empire that had reached around the world, and an industry that no one could compete with, although many tried.” She’s quite staggeringly rich, and so are her children, whom she’s co-opted into various positions involving finance and art, son Phillip the former, son John the latter, for Phillip had ”his father’s steady head for finance,” while “John had inherited Olivia’s innate artistic sense for design.” (A philosophical question: Can something innate be inherited?) But what of the daughters? One is a clinger, afraid of her own shadow, the other resolutely independent and wanting nothing to do with Mom and all her mounds of cash. So what happens when Mom finally hits 70, the family is assembled, various spouses get in on the act and the secrets begin to spill out? Ah, there’s the Steel magic, all regret, gnashing of teeth and tears shed into very expensive glasses of champagne; it ain’t King Lear, but it’s fraught with the dynamite of family dynamics anyway. Can the children pull themselves together enough to keep things going for their children? Can the Empress Olivia keep the empire going? Will The Factory keep on manufacturing things that no one needs but everyone wants?
Come to think of it, this feels more like a factory product than a book as such—competent enough, and resembling a book in form, but with a certain emptiness at its heart. Still, if you care about the tribulations of the very rich, this is your book.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-34320-6
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2012
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