Schoellkopf’s new book is a tense, chatty, upscale New York set-piece informed by art history, color theory, acquisitiveness, drug abuse and much speculation about things spiritual and metaphysical.
In his latest, Schoellkopf (New York Measure, 2008, etc.) interleaves chapters of a fictional dysfunctional family memoir with short biographical sketches of artists Mark Rothko and Ernest Ludwig Kirchner—each notable for his highly personal use of color as well as his suicide. Happily for Peter, the sympathetic narrator-patriarch of this dynastic romance, the death toll is lower—only one of his three daughters, downtown gallerist/junkie Carol, eventually succumbs. But she just might be the lucky one, as her surviving sisters Helen and Nancy soldier on to attend yet another emotionally draining gathering in which high-stakes deals are brokered, sibling rivalry flares up and glib debates about various imponderables flow and eddy endlessly. While the novel’s timeline is willfully obscure (chic heroin use and AIDS appear to be newcomers to the New York art scene), the quest for status among the power elite is eternal. Like the lethally self-absorbed Manhattanites in Woody Allen’s Interiors or an Alex Katz painting, the ladies in question and their partners and various attendants natter on and on, never particularly making their point and never quite being persuaded by their peers, either. Is a black-and-white photograph “real art”? Are Helen’s beloved sub-Rembrandt Dutch genre paintings merely decorative? Is that zillion-dollar Rothko a status symbol or a religious experience on canvas? And what truly gives life value? All of this is open for debate, and debate they do. Only the author’s deft handling of these mostly unlovable characters and their windy discourse keeps the reader turning the pages of this surprisingly sly, Stefan Zweig-influenced novella. A dry Chablis and The 20th Century Art Book might prove useful to readers. While the greedy, talky sisters fail to engage, Schoellkopf’s bios of the doomed Rothko and Kirchner are exquisitely bleak.
Pub Date: May 11, 2009
ISBN: 978-0981865850
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Arbor
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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