Clearly smart and talented, Semple never satisfactorily accomplishes the difficult task of balancing nasty comedy and...
Former television comedy writer Semple offers a semi-satirical, funny-sad romance about a spoiled Hollywood wife, a former television writer, who considers risking all for a wholly inappropriate affair with a sleazy musician.
Violet is the bored, inattentive mother of one-year-old Dot and the unhappy wife to exacting music impresario David when she and bass player Teddy meet cute in a men’s room. Setting aside his greasy hair and coarse conversation, Teddy’s a junkie in AA and a self-described sex addict. Violet, who lives her life according to Stephen Sondheim lyrics, is charmed despite her revulsion. Not only does she pay to have Teddy’s car repaired, soon she is sending Dot to the babysitter and David to a yoga retreat so she and Teddy can have (graphically) dirty sex in her multimillion-dollar Richard Neutra house on Mulholland Drive. David, a self-made man who can be a son of a bitch but who genuinely loves his wife, realizes Violet is cheating and works through his anger in the yoga sweat lodge until he decides to love the marriage back together. Self-absorbed Violet is torn and distracted, but aside from when Dot sustains a minor injury due to maternal negligence, her melodrama is internal. On the other hand, Teddy has actual problems, including Hepatitis C and a lack of disposable income, not to mention that taste for drugs. His feelings for Violet remain ambiguous until he shows emotional courage as his physical strength ebbs. A subplot concerns David’s mercenary and unbelievably dense sister who marries for money and fame, only to learn that her new hubby has (horrors!) Asperger’s syndrome. Her questionable character is supposedly excused by her trauma as a diabetic, and she experiences spiritual redemption after contracting Hep-C: In an unhappy coincidence at her wedding she injects her Humalog with the same needle Teddy has used to shoot up.
Clearly smart and talented, Semple never satisfactorily accomplishes the difficult task of balancing nasty comedy and romantic uplift.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-316-03116-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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