Newcomer Bagshawe, 25, takes the Swell Trash baton from Judith Krantz with a dead-on Hollywood hit. In an Americanization of her British bestseller The Movie, Bagshawe brings some rock 'n' roll and a few Gen-X trappings to the traditional sex-and-shopping romance, while sticking to the basics of the genre in timeless escapist fashion, with soul-wrenching copulation on navy-blue satin Pratesi sheets and equally explicit and detailed descriptions of oral sex and the secrets of makeup. Three women come to Los Angeles to make movies, have sex, and find love: Megan Silver, the mousy young scriptwriter from San Francisco, who writes a blockbuster and diets her thighs off; Eleanor Marshall, the ``ice queen'' CEO of her studio, the most powerful woman in Hollywood, who's dealing with biological-clock issues; and supermodel Roxana Felix, whose skill in bed gets her anything her perfect face and body cannot. Megan is waltzed off her job waitressing at a Hollywood fast-food restaurant by sleazoid young agent David Tauber (great pecs, no soul), who, with his classier superagent boss Sam Kendrick, is using her brilliant script as the glue in a big-deal movie package to be produced by Eleanor and her mentor protÇgÇ Tom Goldman, with whom she has been in love ever since she was a gangly young Yalie desperate for his attention. The male star will be Megan's wolf-eyed rock hero Zach Mason, who makes her his woman in a misty forest on the Seychelles; the director will be the genius of his generation, Fred Florescu; and the female star is cold and calculating Roxana, wounded as a child in ways one frequently hears about on Sally and Oprah. Smart and fun, with perhaps too much Brit label-dropping for an American audience, but distinguished by a shameless sensibility that blithely, repeatedly goes over-the-top.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-83069-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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