There's buoyant fun in Van Wormer's (Benedict Canyon, 1992, etc.) shrewd look at the publishing industry in which—after much splashing around—the little fish manages to swallow the big fish. Hillings & Hillings, the finest literary agency in New York, realizes it's under siege when L.A.-based entertainment megaglomerate International Communications Artists impounds their offices after a merger. Gentle, kind (and aged) Dorothy and Henry Hillings are agents from another era—they care about literature and authors—to whom this kind of corporate behavior is unthinkable and upsetting. When the shock of it gives Dorothy a heart attack, Henry takes her to their Long Island manse to recuperate. While she does, Henry and dowager author Millicent Parks prepare for a counterattack by alerting the agency's loyal clients. Authors race to New York from England, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New Jersey, forming a trusty band that swoops into action to defend the Hillingses from evil adversary Creighton Berns, ICA's new CEO. But Berns is a power broker who could damage the careers of several Hillings & Hillings clients with ties to the entertainment industry: Georgiana Hamilton-Ayres, a movie star who lived with the Hillingses as a child; David Aussenhoff, author turned playboy producer; Elizabeth Robinson, an academic who also appears on PBS; Patty Kleczak, suburban housewife and first-time novelist; and Montgomery Grant Smith, a fat but loveable conservative talk-radio personality. When not bickering and sleeping with one another, the plucky gang finds a little time to sleuth and spy on ICA; this is as much a comedy of manners as a thriller. The denouement may be of more interest to industry insiders than others, since it hinges on copyright law and subsidiary rights to an out-of-print book. A novel about warm agents who care and their loyal, altruistic authors: Shelve this as science fiction.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-517-59214-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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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