An entertaining but overstuffed send-up that sometimes bogs down in provocations.
Avant-garde scenesters subject a square billionaire to cultural readjustment in this raucous debut satire.
In despair, Larry Frommer and his buddy Hank, two down-on-their-luck performance artists in San Francisco’s seedy Tenderloin neighborhood, resort to jobs at soulless computer company SI, where they labor in a cubicle gulag and stage subversive pranks like overflowing the men’s room toilet. When that goes south, the duo mount their most audacious piece yet: abducting Bill Gates–ian software mogul Bill Kunstler and transforming him into a “performance art machine” in much the same way he has molded legions of programmers into workaholic nerds. Their improbable but entertainingly choreographed caper goes smoothly, and Bill, held naked and helpless in a filthy cage in Larry’s apartment, undergoes a sadistic makeover as he’s kept in darkness, subjected to deafening yoga records and brainwashed with theater jargon: “NOW EXPAND IT! ABSTRACT! MOVE YOUR BODY!” The reprogramming, depicted in bloody, scatological and rather disturbing detail, succeeds all too well, and Bill blossoms into a mystical performance savant who soon has Larry and Hank once again dancing to his tune. Larry and Hank’s picaresque adventures lampoon many deserving subcultures, from the scurvy geekdom of Silicon Valley to performance art itself, which comes off as a quagmire of turgid pretention and straw-grabbing sensationalism. “HARK! TARRY! I SUBORDINATE YOUR TEXTUAL DADDY IN MY TWO-FOLD SOLIPSISTIC VAT,” intones one artiste as she bites into a formaldehyde-preserved toad. Wichmann takes aim at these overripe targets with whip-smart prose and a fertile, scabrous comic imagination that feels a bit like a mashup of Rain Man (1988) and Fight Club (1999). Yet there doesn’t seem to be much effort put into shaping or pacing the narrative other than to pile on more craziness until the proceedings implode. As scenes of gross-out excess drag on, the novel starts to feel as exhausting as one of the haphazard performance pieces it parodies.
An entertaining but overstuffed send-up that sometimes bogs down in provocations.Pub Date: April 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9910257-0-1
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Freakshow Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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