A throwaway product not worth the paper it’s printed on.
Associated Press reporter Molloy plumbs the shady side of his trade in a graceless debut about a narcissistic muckraker with delusions of grandeur.
Our narrator is 29-year-old Scott Thomas, a TV journalist mourning a recent relationship wrecked in part by his lack of scruples. In his quest to get famous, Scott agrees to go undercover, shooting in the inflammatory documentary style made famous by a host of filmmakers in the past decade. His target is the greasy kitchens of Gringo’s Southwestern Mexican Grille, a fast-food joint in Tempe, Ariz., instantly recognizable as the doppelgänger of a certain real-life franchise. He needs to move quickly: A loophole that protects the network from legal liability is about to close, and the chain is owned by Glen Ferndekamp, likely to be the next U.S. Secretary of Labor. Molloy tries to wring humor from very thin cloth by exposing his vegan environmentalist protagonist to the horrors of driving an SUV and the rigors of consuming the local cuisine. “In drug movies the hero narc has to do heroin to keep his cover…I have to eat carne asada,” Scott moans. Instead of running with the gags that actually hit the mark, like the profane but enthusiastic work song warbled by Mexican crewmates Juan and Carlos, the author obsesses over the none-too-subtle mechanics of unprincipled reporting and Scott’s tepid affair with his handler, Keegan. The primary moral dilemma, defending a pregnant coworker against the unwelcome advances of their racist, sexist supervisor, is flagrantly telegraphed. The ironic twist that derails the investigation is even more obvious, but it accomplishes the narrator’s goals in ways he hadn’t imagined. Molloy apes the least appealing aspects of Nick Hornby’s humor and the flattest instances of Bret Easton Ellis’s prose, then follows his own badly clichéd instincts to produce a novel at least as gross as the fast food Scott chokes down.
A throwaway product not worth the paper it’s printed on.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7535-1500-6
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Virgin Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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