Mahin’s writing is more thoughtful than a gossip blog and occasionally delivers something poignant or lovely but inclines...
A debut roman à clef from the wry perspective of a celebrity assistant.
A proud third-generation Hollywood resident, Jess has a well-honed ability to see through the endless layers of LA bullshit and render the revelations in sarcastic bons mots. At the same time, she's just as susceptible to the power of celebrity as any average American. In the course of the book, she manages to land two ascending assistantships, first for an nonfamous but successful movie composer, which she then leverages into working for Eva, soap star on the rise. Being Eva’s personal assistant gets Jess the fame and fortune contact high she so craves. Of course, it comes with complications, and not just the type endemic to celebrity assistantships (being essential but disposable, meeting ludicrous demands). Eva is the best friend of Jess’ friend Scout. Eva is also a potential rival of Jess’ best friend, Megan, a hardworking actress. Add Jess’ mother to the mix, newly arrived in LA and representing a damaging legacy of being alternately absentee and narcissistic, and Jess is living in her own soap opera, largely of her own making. Like many novels of this genre, a traditional plot arc is substituted with a series of vignettes, many of which seem added just for fun. And they are fun—gossipy scenes and high-living details, loaded with specificity. Jess’ sardonic views are not limited to Hollywood; she's equally effacing about herself but doesn’t seem to have the same ability to peel back layers and discover the genuine, independent person striving right below the surface. Though tensions pile up, the novel falls short of a satisfyingly cathartic resolution.
Mahin’s writing is more thoughtful than a gossip blog and occasionally delivers something poignant or lovely but inclines toward voyeuristic pleasures.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95504-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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