The series debut of the Palace Theater is edgy enough to push a timeworn formula from the basement up to the balcony. Dumas...
An LA film buff fleeing her cheating spouse discovers a ragtag bunch of misfits—some alive, some dead, and some in between.
San Francisco promises a refuge for Southern California native Nora Paige, whose movie-star husband, Ted Bishop, has run off with his gorgeous young co-star. Her best friend, showrunner Roberta Prowse, offers Nora a cottage in Presidio Heights along with a slightly threadbare movie house to manage. The Palace is a niche theater that specializes in the classic films Nora loved as a child. And her encyclopedic knowledge of film history allows her to craft showings like a Stanley Donen triple bill that delight her loyal but aging patrons. Naturally, a niche theater is staffed by what might be considered niche personnel, including 80-something ticket taker Albert Lockhart, grumpy projectionist Marty Abrams, and cheerful cashier Callie Gee, who berates Nora for letting her “man-slut of a husband go off on location with the most beautiful actress on the planet” but offers comfort in the form of a referral to Monica Chen, proprietor of The Potent Flower, the neighborhood weed shop. The nichiest of the Palace’s crew is undoubtedly usherette Trixie George, who died in 1937 but who’s eerily present to current-day Nora, one of the few living people who can see her. Trixie provides Nora with a unique if dated orientation to the Palace. She’s also the one best placed to help Nora figure out how former drug lord Raul Acosta ended up dead in the Palace’s auxiliary ice machine. Tracking Raul’s killer while riding herd on her eccentric staff provides Nora little rest but ample distraction from Ted’s antics back home.
The series debut of the Palace Theater is edgy enough to push a timeworn formula from the basement up to the balcony. Dumas adds just enough zany to her mix to have readers lining up for more.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63511-466-9
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Henery Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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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