Girl lives happily with boy. Boy has affair. Girl gets mad, then forgives himin this umpteenth contemporary-lifestyle novel by Jaffe (An American Love Story, 1990), etc. Olivia Okrent was always considered the rebel of her extended Jewish familythe wealthy owners of a large department store in New York City. Divorced twice before she was 30, Olivia further scandalized her clan by becoming a veterinarian instead of a ``real'' doctor, and hosting her own Thanksgiving dinners instead of attending the family get-togethers at Uncle Seymour's. It came as no surprise to anyone, then, when Olivia bought an Upper East Side townhouse with handsome fellow vet Roger Hawkwood, set up a practice with him on the first floor, and moved in with him upstairs. Roger, a comfortable, unadventurous sort makes matters worse by refusing to attend the boring funerals and bar mitzvahs that comprise Olivia's family life. Still, as the years pass Olivia decides she likes her lover better than she does her relatives and declines to make an issue of ituntil she learns that while she's attending family affairs, the now 49-year-old Roger is sleeping with a pretty young stockbroker who willingly partakes in the kinds of sexual fantasies that only make Olivia laugh. Mortified, Olivia still can't quite kick her best friend outand, after an overnight May-December fling of her own, allows Roger to resume massaging her feet at the fire while the dogs, Wozzle and Buster, nestle nearby. ``We must get together more often,'' Olivia's cousins murmur to one another as they feast on salmon appetizers in various ballrooms and living rooms across America, having already passed on the latest rumors of familial child abuse, homosexuality, and suicide. Readers are likely to echo poor Roger's eternal question: ``Why?'' If the title's a bit of a bore, Jaffe's plot (or, rather, plotlessness) this time is infinitely more so. (Literary Guild selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1995
ISBN: 1-55611-465-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
