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 fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48882-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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