A contrarian tale that revels in outmoded notions of masculinity and professional success.
In this debut novel, a New York adman grows tired of the fast life and dreams of escape.
Billy Boyd Salinger is a junior account executive at a Manhattan advertising agency. In the book’s opening pages, he receives a promotion to manage a new account with the makers of E-Z Lax, a popular laxative. Billy experiences another life change when he moves into his friend Addison’s apartment, a penthouse owned by his pal’s father. Addison likes drugs, booze, and sex, and so does Billy. Addison is a hard partier, a daddy’s boy, a casual racist, and a lech. Billy’s no better. He’s superficial and brand- and status-obsessed. When he hits on a 16-year-old, he defends himself by observing that the girl “looks buxom enough to be twenty-six.” While listening to a female co-worker, he imagines sticking his “tongue down her throat.” But the colleague, who looks like a model and is coincidentally named Kate Moss, asks him out. Later, when Billy sleeps with his friend Lorraine, a former model, the scene ends with his observation: “I squirt my load and am ravenous.” These episodes are pornographic and violent, with acts done “savagely.” Wilson’s writing is at its best when Billy assesses an expensive object, like Addison’s TV, a “Sony 70-inch Qualia 006 High Definition Television,” or one of the penthouse’s beds, a “hand-carved baroque sleigh bed.” These details do double duty, filling the novel with specificity and revealing Billy’s obsession with material goods. Along the way, the author tries to present Billy as a good guy. But the tale delights in the protagonist’s sexual escapades and eagerly celebrates the behavior of chauvinists. Billy never gets his comeuppance. In addition, the sloppy prose does the book no favors. It’s full of redundant lists, heaps of digressive information, inconsistencies (“craigslist.com” and “Craig’s list”; “E-Z Lax” and “EZ-LAX”), and the occasional malapropism: “I step off the elevator and am immediately impounded by loud music.”
A contrarian tale that revels in outmoded notions of masculinity and professional success.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5488-9231-9
Page Count: 374
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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