Remarkable: hilariously nasty, morally driven, sweetly romantic. Poor Linda: Fritz is irresistible.
In an ambitious satire of post-9/11 America, the author of two previous legal thrillers (The Betrayal, 1998, etc.) manages to skewer our financial, political and social institutions with vicious glee while offering a nuanced portrait of his tragicomic hero (and supporting heroines).
Everything comes easily to handsome, laid-back Fritz Brubaker: beautiful wife, kids in private school, big house in fancy Boston suburb. Fritz cares more about skiing and sailing than about his job as Assistant Comptroller to the corporate conglomerate Playtime. But complaisance goeth before a fall. Playtime has been fudging its profit numbers and is headed for an Enron-style disaster for which no one in the company is willing to take responsibility. Fritz’s wife Linda, a high-powered, hardworking lawyer for whom nothing comes easily, has begun an affair with a fellow law partner out of exasperation with happy-go-lucky Fritz. Fritz’s spoiled son is having “issues” at his progressive private school. When a struggling stockbroker traces a short placed on Playtime to one Phineas Brubaker and sets off a selling frenzy, Fritz is arrested for insider trading. An aging Falstaffian senator, smarting over being snubbed by the President, who used to be his drinking buddy, gets wind of Playtime’s corporate shenanigans and calls for an investigation. Fritz’s testimony speeds both the senator’s and Playtime’s demise. Fritz’s own downfall and redemption (no reader will believe for a second that he committed the crime for which he serves his country-club-prison term) is set within the context of periodic flashbacks to his Econ. 101 class, where his professor devotes the semester to answering the question “What is value?” Full of moral outrage, Willett takes jabs at everything and everyone. Lawyers—Willett himself is one—and corporate CEOs get it the worst. Yet most of the human targets here are more foolish than evil. The one thoroughly unsympathetic villain is the e-mail device, the Blackberry. It gets its just reward.
Remarkable: hilariously nasty, morally driven, sweetly romantic. Poor Linda: Fritz is irresistible.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-6086-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an...
True love flares between two people, but they find that circumstances always impede it.
On a winter day in London, Laurie spots Jack from her bus home and he sparks a feeling in her so deep that she spends the next year searching for him. Her roommate and best friend, Sarah, is the perfect wing-woman but ultimately—and unknowingly—ends the search by finding Jack and falling for him herself. Laurie’s hasty decision not to tell Sarah is the second painful missed opportunity (after not getting off the bus), but Sarah’s happiness is so important to Laurie that she dedicates ample energy into retraining her heart not to love Jack. Laurie is misguided, but her effort and loyalty spring from a true heart, and she considers her project mostly successful. Perhaps she would have total success, but the fact of the matter is that Jack feels the same deep connection to Laurie. His reasons for not acting on them are less admirable: He likes Sarah and she’s the total package; why would he give that up just because every time he and Laurie have enough time together (and just enough alcohol) they nearly fall into each other’s arms? Laurie finally begins to move on, creating a mostly satisfying life for herself, whereas Jack’s inability to be genuine tortures him and turns him into an ever bigger jerk. Patriarchy—it hurts men, too! There’s no question where the book is going, but the pacing is just right, the tone warm, and the characters sympathetic, even when making dumb decisions.
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an emotional, satisfying read.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-57468-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’...
Fresh version of one of the world’s oldest epic poems, a foundational text of Western literature.
Sing to me, O muse, of the—well, in the very opening line, the phrase Wilson (Classical Studies, Univ. of Pennsylvania) chooses is the rather bland “complicated man,” the adjective missing out on the deviousness implied in the Greek polytropos, which Robert Fagles translated as “of twists and turns.” Wilson has a few favorite words that the Greek doesn’t strictly support, one of them being “monstrous,” meaning something particularly heinous, and to have Telemachus “showing initiative” seems a little report-card–ish and entirely modern. Still, rose-fingered Dawn is there in all her glory, casting her brilliant light over the wine-dark sea, and Wilson has a lively understanding of the essential violence that underlies the complicated Odysseus’ great ruse to slaughter the suitors who for 10 years have been eating him out of palace and home and pitching woo to the lovely, blameless Penelope; son Telemachus shows that initiative, indeed, by stringing up a bevy of servant girls, “their heads all in a row / …strung up with the noose around their necks / to make their death an agony.” In an interesting aside in her admirably comprehensive introduction, which extends nearly 80 pages, Wilson observes that the hanging “allows young Telemachus to avoid being too close to these girls’ abused, sexualized bodies,” and while her reading sometimes tends to be overly psychologized, she also notes that the violence of Odysseus, by which those suitors “fell like flies,” mirrors that of some of the other ungracious hosts he encountered along his long voyage home to Ithaca.
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’ recent translations of Homer; still, a readable and worthy effort.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-08905-9
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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