Picaresque political farce from screenwriter Lefcourt (Abbreviating Ernie, 1997, etc.), featuring a crusty, thoroughly incompetent but roguishly charming antihero, Vermont Senator Woodrow Wilson (—Woody—) White—a failure at everything but survival. Woody White was once notorious on Capitol Hill as a man with a —zipper problem,— that is, a compulsive seducer for whom sex with lobbyists, aides, and on the rarest occasions, his trophy-bride Daphne, is one more way of feeling loved. So why, in his vigorous fifth decade, does he find himself impotent with the beauteous Evelyn Brandwynne, a lobbyist representing condom manufacturers? Woody’s not worried about his reelection campaign—his overpaid consultants have summed up his trivial two- term career with a winning slogan: —Woody White—he’s there!— His wife’s affair with a female Finnish figure skater doesn’t thrill him, but he’s willing to ignore that as long as she’ll wear that special dress that catches Clinton’s eye at White House receptions. His previous wives only want their slice of the $1.2 million advance he got from Random House to sign his name on a ghostwritten autobiography. Trent Lott wants cash, and Woody’s support on bills Woody can’t even remember, much less understand, in exchange for forgetting about the damage Woody did when, drunk on expensive wine, he rammed Lott’s Ford Explorer in the Senate parking lot. If this weren’t enough, one of Woody’s major campaign contributors, the Vermont Maple Syrup Distributors Association, is a front for mobsters who name themselves after US presidents. Using his characteristic combination of breezy charisma and dumb luck, Woody manages to survive an ethics investigation, a genuinely worthy political opponent, and other foibles, imbroglios, and potential disasters, discovering, to his delight, that a peculiar procedure involving tape, shaving cream, and Brandwynne in a starched nurse’s uniform cures impotence better than Viagra. Campy, name-dropping, warts-and-gall send-up of Capitol Hill, with enough insider sleaze to make us wonder how Lefcourt did his research, and with whom.
Pub Date: Nov. 3, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-85393-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
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