Fine, literate novel about Marilyn Monroe, in 13 set-pieces. Skirting clichÇs in the Marilyn literature, Toperoff (Lost Sundays, 1989, etc.) devises a dramatic mode of approaching the star that delivers a well-realized MM amid a fully satisfying bevy of supporting characters. The author excels at presence on the scene and dialogue that at its best has an inspired rightness. The 13 chapters include young-married Norma Jean accompanying a wisecracking friend to an abortion and putting herself out by arranging for the car, paying half the bill, and seeing her friend through the physical crisis. We watch her being ``raped'' at nine years old by her mother's boyfriend (Norma Jean's abed with a fake fever, and Mom's away for a half hour), who pretends to be taking the girl's temperature with a rectal thermometer while actually invading her vagina. Still during her teenage marriage, we are with her during a gig with a small band while she grows as a singer and learns to concentrate. If this scene is weak, it's nonetheless followed by a strong one as Marilyn's new agent/lover Johnny Hyde takes her to Hollywood's top plastic surgeon for fuzz removal and slight facial reconstruction. Then follows an amusing scene of Marilyn aloft and cabined with sportswriters in the press box at Yankee Stadium and melting such towering cynics as Red Smith and Jimmy Cannon while Joe DiMaggio fumes. And Joe fumes as Billy Wilder films Marilyn getting her skirts upblown by a New York subway. Then MM wows the Actors Studio. Arthur Miller fumes while Marilyn comes onto Frank Lloyd Wright and wants to accept Wright's high-priced plans for a Connecticut retreat. And so on, through Marilyn's last night, as she dies while talking on the phone with a talk-show host. Extremely skillful and moving.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-06-016611-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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
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