An ambitious, acerbic, entertaining take on the film business.
This hard-edged debut looks at the power, savvy, and ugliness that go into making movies.
Nelson, an actor and playwright who has also written, directed, and produced films, deploys an insider’s knowledge of Hollywood in this story of one director being sought for two productions. In 2019, David Levit gets the call to helm the movie Coal, a prestige project, but he’ll have to deal with Jacob Rosenthal, a powerful producer known for his savage tongue and mania for control. He calls to mind the Kevin Spacey character in Swimming With Sharks. The bigger hitch is that Levit is still under contract to a producer named Brad Shlansky on a shoot that closed down for lack of money. Shlansky, a kind of Rosenthal manqué desperate for clout and respect, won’t release Levit to work on Coal. The novel’s fourth major player is Paul Aiello, a brash agent who knew Shlansky in school and now represents him while juggling a sex life increasingly marked by abusive behavior. Nelson delays the inevitable showdown by providing extensive backstories that help populate the 2019 Hollywood sections with strong characters and motives. He also flags the #MeToo movement with Aiello’s extracurriculars and a character closely drawn from Harvey Weinstein while touching on inclusiveness for people of color and women in filmmaking. The book itself is heavily male and White, but Nelson offers a few strong women, including an amusing older lawyer as verbally aggressive as Rosenthal. One of the book’s pleasures are the rants, including one from the Weinstein character that begins in classic style: "Do you have any idea what I can do to you?" Nelson is a solid writer whose dialogue is smart, pacy, and pointed. The roman à clef elements may go well beyond Weinstein—Levit seems to reflect a good bit of Nelson himself—but the novel works without such extras.
An ambitious, acerbic, entertaining take on the film business.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-951213-65-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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