A lively, insightful rendering of a celebrity’s coming-of-age in the Stork Club era.
A historical novel dramatizes the life of Oona O’Neill Chaplin, with a focus on her teen years in the 1940s in New York City and Hollywood.
In a prologue set in 1927, Oona, “not-quite-two-years,” reaches for her father, Eugene O’Neill, at a family photo shoot. He brushes her away. The story then jumps to Manhattan and Oona at 14. She lives in Greenwich Village with her divorced, distracted mother, Agnes, who has enrolled Oona in the tony Brearley School. Oona meets Carol Marcus, who attends Dalton, at dance class and is soon mostly residing in the Marcus family’s Park Avenue apartment. Carol introduces her to Gloria Vanderbilt, and the girls become popular among the cafe society set. Amid this attention, Oona yearns for more contact with her father, now living in California with his new wife and gatekeeper, Carlotta. Oona finally is allowed to visit but is allotted little time with the playwright, making the vacation, as she later tells Truman Capote, “terrible for a whole week, and then it was over.” She also helps Carol pursue William Saroyan, although Oona labels him a “jerk” and is wary of her own judgmental beau, J.D. Salinger. She then joins her mother, now living in a Hollywood trailer park, which leads to meeting Charlie Chaplin and, at 18, forging a lasting connection with the actor and director. Cain masterfully presents the emotionally neglected, financially shaky Oona as a striving hero whose focus on appearance is part of her battle armor. In a beautifully rendered sequence, Oona smashes a mirror, then “picked up the jagged pieces one by one...straightened her shoulders and got to work setting everything in order.” While her May-December relationship with Chaplin has had Freudian interpretations, the author offers more complexity here, including how Oona inspired the filmmaker’s masterpiece Limelight. Cain covers Oona’s post-marriage life in the book’s final quarter, but the teen years, perhaps inevitably, are the high point of this engaging novel.
A lively, insightful rendering of a celebrity’s coming-of-age in the Stork Club era.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781949935615
Page Count: 470
Publisher: Orange Blossom Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
There is only one Patricia Lockwood, and this surreal, silly, and sneakily profound book could only be hers.
In the wake of a disorienting illness, a woman attempts to write “a masterpiece about being confused.”
What on earth is happening to the unnamed protagonist of this novel? She suffers from “bizarre nonsense dreams,” feels there is “a secret number between two and three,” and sees “a zigzag” in the corner of her eye that she refers to as “the angel.” Has an unnamed illness “stolen her old mind and given her a new one?” We’re told she “first got sick” in March 2020, and because the details of the protagonist’s life and work track so closely with the author’s, we assume it is Covid-19, which left Lockwood in a post-Covid fog, described in an essay for the London Review of Books. This is no straightforward illness diary, but a “mad notebook” capturing the sensory experience and psychic state of a character in extremis. It opens with a family trip to Scotland, seemingly before the pandemic—but never mind, linearity and narrative are beside the point. In Scotland, the protagonist suddenly believes in fairies; throughout the book she is obsessed with changelings, doppelgängers, knockoff Cabbage Patch Kids, cloned sheep, Mrs. Doubtfire, a potential TV adaptation of her memoir, Priestdaddy, and all manner of facsimiles that point toward the existential question of the title. Somewhat incidentally, she reads and feverishly analyzes Anna Karenina, tries her hand at metalworking, and, after her husband undergoes emergency surgery that leaves him with 36 staples in the abdomen, finds herself “in charge of the Wound.” Wherever this phantasmagoric book takes us, it is shot through with a poet’s love for the slippery absurdities of language and abundant laugh-out-loud gags. Can we hope for a one-woman show?
There is only one Patricia Lockwood, and this surreal, silly, and sneakily profound book could only be hers.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593718551
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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