Still: Perceptive and close to brilliant, when it’s not trying too hard to be funny.
What you might get if you crossed Bret Easton Ellis with Salman Rushdie.
Of course, Wenzel’s second outing (after Lit Life, 2001) is written like neither of theirs. Where Ellis and Rushdie come in for comparison here is in regard to its protagonist, Kyle Clayton. He’s one of those bad-boy Manhattan novelists whose meteoric fame seems in inversely proportionate to the length of their slim but award-studded volumes. Clayton hit big in the 1980s and has acted like a pompous bad-boy ever since. It’s now the late ’90s and he’s desperate for a comeback. And where better to mine material than from his marriage to a Muslim Turkish woman, a marriage that necessitated the WASP-y Clayton’s conversion to Islam? After a magazine publishes an excerpt of the book (it starts with the line, “All Muslims are mad, of course”), things become a bit strained between Clayton and his wife Ayla and her family, what with the death threats and all. On the edges of Clayton’s self-destructive behavior—he’s a raging, barely recovered alcoholic—is Erin Wyatt, a struggling actress he once had a fling with. Erin is now waiting tables at the city’s hottest eatery, City, owned by Loomy Tumin, a blindingly rich investor who has a thing for Erin and who’s going to be interviewed by Clayton for a Talk-esque magazine. Unlike many novels of New York, which try to eviscerate a particular subculture, Wenzel’s has an omnivorous, Tom Wolfe-ian appetite for the city at all levels and a rakish ability to sketch it all in howlingly funny, satirical ways. By the time it all comes to its explosive if somewhat hollow finish, though, Wenzel has probably bitten off more than he can chew and has to try too hard to bring the whole to its sort of upbeat conclusion.
Still: Perceptive and close to brilliant, when it’s not trying too hard to be funny.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-09400-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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