Rough start but finally builds into an engaging debut.
First novel from a new press that focuses on original literary paperbacks (see Grimes, above). This tyro’s effort, however, is far less of a treasure than Grimes’s psychopharmacological whiz.
Back in the mid-’90s, Martin Sierra, an unpublished young Spanish/American writer abandoned by his poetess mother in childhood, now rooms in Brooklyn but is a habitué of Alphabet City clubs on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He may well have a collection of rejection slips heavier than the Sunday New York Times. His latest poems have come back with a mustard smear and not even the courtesy of a rejection slip. Martin cruises clubs looking for girls, but he even gets turned down by hookers in automobiles. Drinks quite a bit. Best bud is Nikki, a lesbian dreamboat who may neck with him at ear-banging clubs but who won’t let him on board. The clubs rave with freak scenes, and from the Useless-Nameless band a transvestite entertainer in emerald wig and wrapped only in Saran Wrap sings to trendies, B-list models, groovers high on X, eccentrics, and fashion victims. And Nikki dances with Martin, letting it all hang out! She’s just priceless! Sweet heaven! And on Second Street at 3 p.m., wild-assed kids with assorted mental problems mix with homeless crackheads. A Japanese firm’s Air Shipping clerk, Marty self-publishes his first book, Idealism and Early Wish-fulfillment, and spends six months hustling it on St. Marks Place, selling sixty copies. He also follows The Village Voice personals closely, has his own ad in the back, writes long letters to women who answer. He’s supposed to meet Lola in front of Kim’s Video on St. Marks Place. Is she this petite goth girl, clutching a bouquet of barbed wire, mincing past? Body-pierced Lola’s an art student who paints hyper-real scenes of intense psychopathic violence. Then comes Amaris, who, unbuckling him, says, “Hurry up, you sexist prick.”
Rough start but finally builds into an engaging debut.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-9713415-9-1
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Ludlow Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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