This comic fable about making an Exorcist-like horror movie has its moments—and, heaven knows, may not overestimate the gross appetites of a portion of the American reading public. Each Blatty (Legion, 1983, etc.) paragraph drools with faux- movie dialogue and highbrow asides (to The Magic Mountain, Shakespeare, Emily Brontâ, Dickens, Prince Miskin, etc). The most memorable figure in the book is reminiscent of the Nazi playwright from the Mel Brooks film The Producers, rendered here as a demented film projectionist in a Prussian army helmet, Jesus Machtmeintag (Makemyday). His scenes are particularly droll. `` `Go avay!' shrieked the deep German voice hysterically. `You haff zer wrong man, I tell you! I am innocent!' There followed adamant denials that he'd ever gone bowling with Joseph Goebbels, weekend flying with Rudolph Hess, knew anything whatever of letters of transit, or had ever defaced Casablanca posters to suggest the film's hero was Conrad Veidt. `All lies!' bellowed Machtmeintag in a fury.'' The scenario: Celebrated director Jason Hazard has been in the dumps for three years when archfiend/studio head Arthur Zelig hires him to direct the film version of Jonathan Drood's bestseller, The Satanists. Hazard has run off with Zelig's ex-wife, leading actress Spritely God, and Zelig schemes to make sure that The Satanist will be a colossal bomb, blowing Hazard completely out of the water and driving Spritely back into his bed. She, however, is so aghast at Drood's script that she demands the studio be exorcised. Various exorcists show up throughout, including Don Rickles, who fails to exorcise Spritely's cat, Barbra, which sings like Streisand and turns into a gigantic rat on a levitating bed. Perhaps Mel Brooks will direct the movie? Echoes of musty old Max Schulman novels, with some laugh-out- loud lines about Hollywood lost in extra-luxuriant false classicism and excess.
Pub Date: Sept. 17, 1996
ISBN: 1-55611-501-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996
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
Catch-22 is also concerned with some of war's horrors and atrocities, and it is at times painfully grim.
Catch-22 is an unusual, wildly inventive comic novel about World War II, and its publishers are planning considerable publicity for it.
Set on the tiny island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean Sea, the novel is devoted to a long series of impossible, illogical adventures engaged in by the members of the 256th bombing squadron, an unlikely combat group whose fanatical commander, Colonel Cathcart, keeps increasing the men's quota of missions until they reach the ridiculous figure of 80. The book's central character is Captain Yossarian, the squadron's lead bombardier, who is surrounded at all times by the ironic and incomprehensible and who directs all his energies towards evading his odd role in the war. His companions are an even more peculiar lot: Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who loved to win parades; Major Major Major, the victim of a life-long series of practical jokes, beginning with his name; the mess officer, Milo Minderbinder, who built a food syndicate into an international cartel; and Major de Coverley whose mission in life was to rent apartments for the officers and enlisted men during their rest leaves. Eventually, after Cathcart has exterminated nearly all of Yossarian's buddies through the suicidal missions, Yossarian decides to desert — and he succeeds.
Catch-22 is also concerned with some of war's horrors and atrocities, and it is at times painfully grim.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1961
ISBN: 0684833395
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1961
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