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OFF THE DEEP END

THE SEARCH FOR PARADISE

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

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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

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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THE VEGETARIAN

An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.

In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.

Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.

An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.

Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015

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