The creator of the Tony Cassella p.i. stories (Foreign Exchange, etc.) turns to political satire with a breathtakingly nasty premise: Operation Desert Storm was not only staged for TV but was a piece of Hollywood entertainment drafted and choreographed by filmmakers. Joe Broz, of Universal Security (U.Sec.), is offered a perilously off-the-books job by dazzling Hollywood star Maggie Krebs: lay the groundwork for a $750,000 breach-of-contract suit against RepCo, the talent agency that owns both her and hot director John Lincoln Beagle, by finding out the real reason—not the illness the agency's selling- -that Beagle was abruptly pulled off and the project aborted. Hopelessly smitten with Maggie, Joe (``I'm an authentic American hero. Really'') signs on, only to find that U.Sec. is already in the game- -and not kidding around: they've bugged Maggie's place, they're tailing Joe, they're willing to kill Beagle's inoffensive librarian when Joe lures him into a meeting. What kind of movie would justify such fanaticism? A war movie, as we've already realized—a movie whose concept brainsick Machiavellian Lee Atwater drafted on his deathbed as just the ticket to resuscitate George Bush's faltering image. As Bush and Jim Baker trade gorgeously plausible malapropisms (``Talk about nitty-gritty and cutting through to the nuts of the matter. When Lee Atwater is passing, it's hardball''), Joe maneuvers to get the goods on RepCo head David Hartman and U.Sec.'s Melvin Taylor, Joe's boss, so that even if he can't avert the war, he can help Maggie get her hands on that golden parachute. Joe's plots against the totalitarian conspirators wind down to routine melodrama. The real smart bombs here are Beinhart's diabolical vignettes of the totalitarian alliance of the Oval Office and the entertainment industry (``Who are we going to war with?'' ``I don't know. It's just in development''). Think of a left-wing P.J. O'Rourke, or a Stanley Kubrick production of 1984. What a terrific movie this book is never, ever going to make.
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-47276-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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