A delightfully lighthearted tale that engages serious issues through farce.
A novel about big ideas in a small town.
Thomas Donaldson became the mayor of Stirling, Wisconsin, in the hope of eventually running for the state senate. Reviving a small, failing town, he thinks, would count as evidence of qualification for grander office. However, he learns that George McBurney has posted a sign on his 600-acre farm announcing his plan to build a full-scale model of Noah’s Ark as an expression of his religious belief. Thomas tries to dissuade him, but George is fiercely committed to his “Big Idea” and prepared for a protracted political fight if anyone tries to stop him. Meanwhile, Martha Downing reports that she witnessed the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary, often called “BVM” for short, emblazoned on a cement wall of an underpass. Lowell Waller visits what many immediately interpret to be a shrine and regains the power of speech that he lost following a stroke. Martha and some other like-minded enthusiasts waste no time in declaring Lowell’s boon a miracle. Thomas struggles to balance his own genuine religiosity with his desire to avoid public embarrassment. Meanwhile, he tries to delicately handle public opinion about the prospect of George’s ark, which he views as a ridiculous future eyesore. Thomas also learns that his daughter, once a star student at Yale University, is undergoing hormonal therapy to become a man. Author Reed’s (Saluting the Sun, 2015, etc.) novel is wildly implausible and flirts too conspicuously with attempts to make the plot serve a greater lesson. As is often the case with intentional farce, some of the characters are reductive caricatures—more like personified punch lines than fully fleshed-out people. However, the story is so inventive and genuinely funny that readers should be able to forgive its heavy-handedness. Reed dishes out ridiculousness without devolving into manic slapstick and courageously tackles controversial issues with a graceful touch. The author rightfully lets her characters speak for themselves as much as possible, with sharp-tongued dialogue that never seems overly contrived.
A delightfully lighthearted tale that engages serious issues through farce.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9962525-5-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ampersand Editions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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