A zany, if sometimes-excessive, novel that makes a mockery of many topical issues.
Plaster (Ticks, 2014, etc.) offers a satirical novel about political correctness in America.
When readers first meet Henryetta Hebert, a journalist for the Weekly Herald, “a small town newspaper” serving Henryetta, Oklahoma, she’s troubled. Her former high school sweetheart, the professional football player Gaylord Goodhart, has come out as gay, and he’s soon to marry one of his Dallas Cowboys teammates. She weeps after she reads the wedding announcement, recalling Gaylord as the man “who would always be the love of her life.” Meanwhile, the town of Henryetta sees itself engulfed in a controversy: Hildegard “Hilde” Bottomly, a frustrated political figure that some people describe as “a virtual Hillary Rodham Clinton doppelganger,” returns to town for her high school reunion. She’s shocked to find that the school’s team name has changed from the “Fighting Hens” to the “Golden Knights.” This stirs up a dispute about the name of the town itself, and it’s not long before this economically stagnant (“About everyone in town was equally broke”) and football-worshipping town becomes a tempest of political excitement. If the names of the townspeople are any indication, it’s a wacky tempest indeed. The book takes place very much in the now: Caitlyn Jenner, Donald Trump, and Bill O’Reilly are among the real-life figures mentioned. However, it’s the more homespun characters and their antics that shine the brightest. The book is at its best when it’s tackling thorny subjects, although the narrative does coast into extreme territory. Whether a reader finds this humorous depends greatly on his or her tolerance for such fare as a magazine article aimed at “metrosexual” men that offers a memo to Jenner: “Do not lop off that little thingy down there between your legs. Bend it like Beckham, but don’t break it!”
A zany, if sometimes-excessive, novel that makes a mockery of many topical issues.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9914480-5-0
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Mossik Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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