by Michael Tucker ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2012
A lightweight novel that’s paradoxically both earthy and frothy.
Actor Tucker, best known for his work on L.A. Law, writes his first novel—about an actor who loses his beloved wife to cancer, though hints of a May-December romance are in the wings.
Herbie Aaron and his wife Annie have been a celebrity couple over many long years, but Annie is now facing her final curtain. Herbie deals with this in part by hitting the bars pretty hard, and in one he notices Olive, a bartender who’s a knockout but who’s also young enough to be his daughter. He tells Annie about Olive, and Annie insists on meeting her. When the inevitable happens and Annie dies, Herbie gets in touch with his agent to help Olive land a job—somewhat implausibly—as an actress, and despite the prodigious unemployment rate among professional actors, Olive lands a job in Uncle Vanya, albeit in Rochester rather than on Broadway. Meanwhile, Herbie copes by heading to South Carolina to play some golf and reminisce about the good times he had with Annie. While trying to master the intricacies of a game he doesn’t even like, he hires Billy (a woman) to improve his skill on the links, but because Billy is a lesbian, Herbie wisely senses the unlikelihood of romance from that quarter, though Billy’s sister Roxanne is another story. Every evening, however, he gets a phone call from Olive, who gives progress reports on her rehearsals with a hot-shot young director and a lead actor who seems to be having psychotic episodes—or is he merely an actor who pretends to have psychotic episodes to juice up his role as Vanya? By the end we’re led to believe that despite his loyalty to Annie, Herbie might in fact find a life with Olive.
A lightweight novel that’s paradoxically both earthy and frothy.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59020-735-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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