Despite the soap-opera finish at hospital bedside, a cozy story of three likable artists on the up and up.
An engaging second from actress O’Connor (Like China, 1990) is a roman á clef about the mercurial careers and emotional histrionics of three inseparable New York actors in the late 1970s.
The three first meet at a hotly competitive actors’ workshop run by suave, sneering Andre Sadovsky in upstairs Carnegie Hall: narrator Robert Holt is a driven perfectionist from New Jersey whose mother was a Rockette and father deserted the family when Robert was two; tall gay Patrick O’Doherty is a former Broadway dancer whose scary secret sex life will eventually fray relations among them all; and fresh from Coffeyville, Kansas, at just 21, Irene Jane Walpers is the natural ingénue. The three pal around town as charmingly improvident artists, sharing apartments, tips on auditions, and moral support; they become hand-picked protégés of Andre, who runs the exclusive summer-arts festival in Connecticut where Robert and Irene’s flirtation is interrupted by Andre’s whisking her away to live with him as assistant of the hour and traveling companion. Further tensions are introduced when Patrick, a pathological liar who can’t find his true role, takes to his bed in depression for days after rejection or vanishes for nights of cruising, then reappears badly beaten up. O’Connor knows her stuff—getting the agent runaround, understudying for actors who won’t move over, sleeping with people to get connections, landing the cushy job in a soap opera that turns into a sorry career. Entering her gritty Hell’s Kitchen of the hand-to-mouth actor is like watching a documentary of a bygone New York. Eventually, success strikes the one we least expect, Robert, who picks up women in department stores: he feels he’s lost to his friends when he moves out to LA, yet he can’t change his true nature, which is love of good roles—and Irene and Patrick.
Despite the soap-opera finish at hospital bedside, a cozy story of three likable artists on the up and up.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2003
ISBN: 1-56512-373-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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