Once again experimenting with commercial forms, Jones (Blind Pursuit, 1997, etc.) turns boondocks noir into hallucinogenic horror as a down-on-his-luck drifter finds love and villainy in a seedy lakeside motel. Nat Banyon stops his stolen car on a mountain road to help Herman Finch, an aging, pistol-packing former boxer who’s run his Cadillac into a ditch. Herman offers him pocket money and free breakfasts if he’ll paint his run-down Deepwater Motel, situated near an Indian-reservation gambling casino. Nat accepts when he glimpses Mrs. Finch: a dark-haired sexpot half Herman’s age. Not long after Nat sets up his ladder, Iris and Nat are happily going at it in the first of many hot sex scenes, plotting to escape the motel with Herman’s hidden cache of cash. What seems to be a familiar trail worn smooth by James M. Cain and Jim Thompson turns weird as Nat, an orphan, begins to have eerie nightmares and daydreams about his troubled past, a baby who may have been drowned, and Herman’s menacing rottweiler. Among the peculiar thoughts Nat entertains is that Herman might be his father. After police find the waterlogged, half-eaten corpse of a ne’er-do-well who owed Herman money, Herman, who hints he knows his wife is having an affair, cuts deals with Nat that put him only deeper in debt. Then Herman makes Nat an offer he can’t refuse: beat him in a boxing match, and all Nat’s debts are canceled. As Nat trains for the fight, he finds himself waking up at odd hours of the night, filthy and wounded without any memory of what has passed. Iris warns him that Herman never loses a bet, while Nat wonders whether it’s Herman, the rottweiler, or something worse controlling his thoughts and planning his doom. The postman rings again in a malignant pastoral of steamy sex, Oedipal terror, and a few too many Faulknerian fever dreams.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-58234-059-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
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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