A drawn-out tale that starts out promising but is laid low by a shallow, unlikable protagonist.
This madcap comedy-satire follows an ambitious 60-something screenwriter and her quest to make it at any cost.
Kay Baldwin—pen name: “Kathryn Murphy”—is a divorced nutritionist on the verge of two life changes: losing her home and selling her first, autobiographical screenplay. Accomplishing the latter could prevent the former, but movie studios seem to value youth more than anything. Kay’s agent suggests hiring a younger actress to impersonate her in a meeting with producers, but Kay has another idea: to send her daughter Lori, an attorney on the cusp of getting married, to pretend to be Kathryn Murphy. One meeting turns into several, and soon, hotshot studio head Joel Telzmon becomes one of Kay’s nutritionist clients—and a potential romantic interest. But when Joel’s partner, the formidable Simon Stouffer, voices his opinion on the screenplay, Kay’s initial lie grows more elaborate. Simon hates the script and wants to produce another—a drama about an African-American family, written by his own niece. Then Simon’s wife threatens divorce if that script isn’t done to her specifications. The novel begins as a funny, sharp look at the film industry’s impossible standards of youth. However, it soon descends into a rather sad tale. Kay is so single-minded in pursuit of her goal—“The primary issue, the only issue, was the fate of her script”—that she forces her daughter into increasingly uncomfortable situations that jeopardize her own love life and future. Rather than face her own fears of insolvency, Kay chooses to inconvenience and alienate everyone around her, and her redemption comes too late for readers to care. The smart, thoughtful Lori would have made a delightful main character; instead, she ends up doing way too much for her incapable parent. Also, the story becomes overwhelmed by extraneous subplots involving tax fraud, casual racism, and a very silly argument over dance lessons.
A drawn-out tale that starts out promising but is laid low by a shallow, unlikable protagonist.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 443
Publisher: Big Hat Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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