A sprawling, freewheeling tale of a young woman's uncanny sexual powers, the virtues of altruism, the Devil, Dan Quayle (herein known as Jefferson Stinkweed), and the bad stuff that happens if you watch TV, among other things. The young woman is Celeste Kipplebaum Runetoon Kelly, born to a mother two days dead, which gives you a good idea of what you're in for—a whimsical but freighted journey down roads already well traveled by Tom Robbins's sexually free, gloriously misfit hitchhiker Sissy Hankshaw in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976). Celeste's bliss, however, comes not from the pursuit of pure freedom but from the orgasmic thrill of healing others though sexual connection. Not content with mere physical healing, mind you (though she can cure AIDS, no problem), she gets deep into the very soul of each sufferer she fondles, from a browbeaten and balding neighbor to a tap-dancing serial killer, and melts away the hurt, restoring each to his (or her) youthful, unsaddened, unsullied self. Despite the perks that come with her work, Celeste (aka ``Queen of the Unseen, the Princess of Caress, the Dame of the Lame, the Countess of Regress, Her Majesty of Nudity,'' as the little voices between her legs chant) sometimes tires of her relentless sexual battle against the forces of evil, longing to be ordinary. ``Did King Arthur wish he were normal? Don Quixote?'' sputters her grandmother with righteous indignation. ``Whoever said being a knight would be easy? You can perform unprecedented miracles! Consider yourself lucky.'' So Celeste presses on, and on, to a climactic meeting with the Prince of Darkness himself. Perhaps no one can surpass Robbins's sublime stew of nonsense and wisdom, though this, Simon's first novel (her short-story collection, Little Nightmares, Little Dreams, 1990, mined much of the same territory), has plenty of the former and is abubble with wildly imaginative, sometimes gratingly cute language: ``She shoved the window open. The lake sibilated, geese ronked, leaves oodly-oodly-ooed.'' But despite its heavy themes—the spiritual sickness rampant in modern society, the redemptive powers of love- -and core of seriousness, the novel never gets any more than ankle-deep; and Celeste's powers, so seductive to others, never convince or move us. Simon's story is fun to spend the night with, but there's no afterglow.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-85262-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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