Delightfully trashy morality tale posing as a Primary Colors political roman Ö clef, this time dishing and damning the Republican camp. How close is the colorless fictional California millionaire Edward Winston, who tries to buy his way into state politics, to the failed senate candidate Michael Huffington? First-novelist Lowe, a former aide on the Huffington campaign, as well as a writer for the McLaughlin Group (rendered here as McHoffman Group, whose “outspoken host,” we—re told, is a “filthy animal”), seems content to burn every bridge in this frothy, funny, sex- and caffeine-fueled How-to-Exceed-in-Politics adventure. Lowe’s ingenuous antihero, Jim Asher, a good-looking, articulate California surfer bum, rises in less than a year from an unpaid campaign volunteer position to become the “Luke Skywalker of Republican politics,” trading in his used Ford Probe for a nasty black Hummee with SPIN DR on the license plate. Beginning with a lucky plunge in a hot tub with influential TV news reporter Samantha Gelhorne (which leads to a nude massage session with the candidate’s bossy wife Mariella), Asher lets the world of pressure-cooker politics transform him into a coffee- and booze-guzzling samurai armed with cellphones, laptops, and a libido that never fails. Asher rapidly jumps from Winston’s doomed campaign into a race to recall a “turncoat” Republican, shoving Brett Alexander, a shallow but well-intentioned political naif, into the coveted position of Speaker of the California Assembly, and then as a possible Republican vice presidential candidate. Every dirty trick Asher pulls is first spelled out for him by jaded journalists and bored political hacks. He seems invincible until Frank Buckman, a powerful assemblyman whom Asher decked during a Republican victory celebration, uses the same tricks to take Asher down. A hilarious hash of political low-jinks, thinly fictionalized gossip, and clever jabs at high-living conservatives that charms and scandalizes with disarming ease.
Pub Date: July 7, 1998
ISBN: 0-671-01923-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
Hilderbrand’s portrait of the upper-crust Tate clan through the years is so deliciously addictive that it will be the “It”...
Queen of the summer novel—how could she not be, with all her stories set on an island—Hilderbrand delivers a beguiling ninth (The Castaways, 2009, etc.), featuring romance and mystery on isolated Tuckernuck Island.
The Tate family has had a house on Tuckernuck (just off the coast of swanky Nantucket) for generations. It has been empty for years, but now Birdie wants to spend a quiet mother-daughter week there with Chess before Chess’s wedding to Michael Morgan. Then the unthinkable happens—perfect Chess (beautiful, rich, well-bred food editor of Glamorous Home) dumps the equally perfect Michael. She quits her job, leaves her New York apartment for Birdie’s home in New Canaan, and all without explanation. Then the unraveling continues: Michael dies in a rock-climbing accident, leaving Chess not quite a widow, but devastated, guilty, unreachable in the shell of herself. Birdie invites her younger daughter Tate (a pretty, naïve computer genius) and her own bohemian sister India, whose husband, world-renowned sculptor Bill Bishop, killed himself years ago, to Tuckernuck for the month of July, in the hopes that the three of them can break through to Chess. Hunky Barrett Lee is their caretaker, coming from Nantucket twice a day to bring groceries and take away laundry (idyllic Tuckernuck is remote—no phone, no hot water, no ferry) as he’s also inspiring renewed lust in Tate, who has had a crush on him since she was a kid. The author jumps between the four women—Tate and her blossoming relationship with Barrett, India and her relationship with Lula Simpson, a painter at the Academy where India is a curator, Birdie, who is surprised by the recent kindnesses of ex-husband Grant, and finally Chess, who in her journal is uncoiling the sordid, sad circumstances of her break with normal life and Michael’s death.
Hilderbrand’s portrait of the upper-crust Tate clan through the years is so deliciously addictive that it will be the “It” beach book of the summer.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-04387-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
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