An entertaining drama that reaffirms the familiar adage that family and business don’t mix.
In Claud’s debut, a matriarch’s death triggers petty rivalries in a family business.
Even before Ward Mills CEO Dolly Ward passes away from cancer in 1988, Ted Brunson knows that the sun is slowly setting on the textile industry. For years, the family business in South Carolina has held its own among the “Big Five,” but global changes in the textile trade are slowly hitting home. Ted sees that the time has come for the company to be sold; the problem is that he’s an outsider, a Ward by marriage only. Although he’s the heir apparent to Dolly’s position, he might not have enough support from family board members who have other plans for the company. (The son of modest hardware-store owners, Ted is the titular “Dancin’ Man—a metaphorical toy easily manipulated by external circumstances.) To compound the situation, his marriage to Virginia Ward, Dolly’s only daughter, is on the rocks. Virginia also struggles as she tries to make peace with her past, including a strained mother-daughter relationship. Ted’s college friend, Virginia’s brother Sam, is about the only person who’s firmly on his side; years ago, Sam ignored Ted’s lack of blue blood and inducted his future brother-in-law to South Carolina high society. An assortment of other family members, including two Ward brothers that form part of the family’s “Atlanta contingent,” rounds out the cast. Claud’s descriptions of sprawling horse farms, languorous summer evenings and glimpses of Southern wealth (“The lawn rolled out before Ted glowing with the same emerald intensity as the fairways of the Fort Hill Country Club”) add delightful touches to this fast-paced narrative. Yet the story’s tight arc leaves some elements underexplored; it’s never clear, for example, what happens to Ted’s parents after he’s assimilated into the Ward clan. Also, an element of family scandal thrown in at the very end comes across as a tad disjointed and out of place. Nevertheless, this novel about the end of a way of life often makes for transporting reading.
An entertaining drama that reaffirms the familiar adage that family and business don’t mix.Pub Date: March 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0988416499
Page Count: 282
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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