Capable but unexciting rehash of classic sleaze.
They’re b-a-a-a-a-c-k!
The two surviving heroines of Jacqueline Susann’s seminal 1968 trash epic, Valley of the Dolls, are a lot older but not significantly wiser in this sequel by the author of Satisfaction (1987). Former model Anne Welles is married to movie agent Lyon Burke, and singer Neely O’Hara is knocking ’em dead in Vegas. They’ve had their share of life’s rewards and life’s disappointments. Anne has a beautiful little daughter and everything money can buy, including a Fifth Avenue apartment and a house in Southampton. She knows her husband will never be faithful, but she’s come to terms with that (discreet tippling on expensive wine helps a little). Several-times married Neely has identical twin sons who live with their father—not that she cares much. Getting her act together after a stint in rehab, she’s as brassy as ever, wowing the “fat people with fat wallets” out in the Nevada desert while she dreams of a movie career to rival Barbra Streisand’s. For the most part, their bad-girl days are over, and an occasional Valium or Xanax is about it for cheap thrills. Flash forward: Anne has divorced Lyon and hosts a morning TV show. Neely is stuck in a going-nowhere relationship with producer Dave Feld, and her comeback fantasies have evaporated. Her son Dylan is taking suggestive photographs of Anne’s daughter Jenn, who’s only 13, and simultaneously carrying on an illicit affair with an older woman, Anne’s friend Gretchen. What’s a mother to do? Get pregnant again! The culprit: good old Lyon, Anne’s ex, an upper-class Brit who’s inexplicably attracted to Neely’s raucous charm. Neely pops a few pills, frets, and throws tantrums, but life goes on. Will Lyon survive his tempestuous relationship with noisy Neely? Will icy Anne ever warm up to her newest wealthy suitor? Will someone please throw a bucket of cold water on all those copulating teenagers?
Capable but unexciting rehash of classic sleaze.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60585-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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
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
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