Another Hollywood romp from Lefcourt (Eleven Karens, 2003, etc.), who takes us on the road with a washed-up TV producer trying to jump-start his career with a reality series in Uzbekistan.
Charlie Berns, like every has-been in LA, was a serious player not so long ago. But for the past four years Charlie has run out of ideas—at least the sort anyone in town wants to buy. Broke and homeless, Charlie has been reduced to living in his nephew’s pool house and driving a borrowed Honda to his DA (Debtors Anonymous) meetings. At one of these, he meets a shadowy character named Fenster, who claims to work for the CIA and pitches Charlie one of the strangest story ideas he’s ever heard: a reality show about a Central Asian warlord. It’s an indication of how desperate Charlie is that he not only hears Fenster out but signs on for the pitch, which he takes to a secret subsidiary of ABC called (what else?) ABCD. They snap up Fenster’s treatment, and soon Charlie and Fenster are trekking deep into the mountains of Uzbekistan to meet Izbul Kharkov, a rebel warlord who rules over a godforsaken region of the former Soviet Union that’s about the size of Montana. A big fan of The Sopranos, Izbul is delighted at the thought of appearing on TV and gladly agrees to allow a crew of Polish cameramen to follow him and his family around all day as they work, eat, argue, copulate, kill camels, fight off hand-grenade attacks, assassinate rivals, and shake down old men and children who owe them money. The show is an immediate hit, but Charlie is the victim of his own success when the Georgian mafia, the State Department, the IRS, and the US Special Forces become involved. No such thing as bad publicity? Maybe in LA, but not Uzbekistan.
Outrageously funny, deftly narrated, but spun out for too many pages, tripping up on its own tangled plot.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-4920-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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A group of strangers who live near each other in London become fast friends after writing their deepest secrets in a shared notebook.
Julian Jessop, a septuagenarian artist, is bone-crushingly lonely when he starts “The Authenticity Project”—as he titles a slim green notebook—and begins its first handwritten entry questioning how well people know each other in his tiny corner of London. After 15 years on his own mourning the loss of his beloved wife, he begins the project with the aim that whoever finds the little volume when he leaves it in a cafe will share their true self with their own entry and then pass the volume on to a stranger. The second person to share their inner selves in the notebook’s pages is Monica, 37, owner of a failing cafe and a former corporate lawyer who desperately wants to have a baby. From there the story unfolds, as the volume travels to Thailand and back to London, seemingly destined to fall only into the hands of people—an alcoholic drug addict, an Australian tourist, a social media influencer/new mother, etc.—who already live clustered together geographically. This is a glossy tale where difficulties and addictions appear and are overcome, where lies are told and then forgiven, where love is sought and found, and where truths, once spoken, can set you free. Secondary characters, including an interracial gay couple, appear with their own nuanced parts in the story. The message is strong, urging readers to get off their smartphones and social media and live in the real, authentic world—no chain stores or brands allowed here—making friends and forming a real-life community and support network. And is that really a bad thing?
An enjoyable, cozy novel that touches on tough topics.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7861-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Categories: GENERAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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