The satirical swipes at Tinseltown are missing here, apart from that funeral scene. The rest is all Suzanne, and she’s just...
Novelist/actress/screenwriter Fisher offers a sequel to Postcards From the Edge (1987), with many of the same elements: another head-trip with a lost Hollywood soul—and drugs, drugs, drugs.
Since we last saw her, Suzanne Vale had married and had a child. Studio exec Leland was sweet, caring and great in bed; still, he left her three years ago . . . for a guy. So darling daughter Honey, now six, has become Suzanne’s focus, except when Suzanne is gigging as a cable talk-show hostess or sending little Honey off to Leland. But why must Leland have a much better TV, and regular folks for parents, in contrast to her own flaky showbiz mom? And how has she managed so long without sex? The drought ends with a successful play for Dean Bradbury (“Hollywood’s original bad boy”) at a producer’s funeral. The pair’s one-night stand is followed by a longer run with Thor, a towering blond who brings out the slut in Suzanne, which also means giving up the meds she needs for her bipolar whatever, which is when all hell breaks loose. Suzanne destroys her patio in the middle of the night, has her hair cut off, gets a tattoo, and drives to Tijuana with the tattoo artist. Okay, he’s an ex-con, but he’s loaded with OxyContins. Meanwhile, never a thought for Honey. Rescued by best friend Craig, Suzanne messes up her new meds and winds up in the nuthouse, not such a great change from the world outside: people continue to loom up out of the drug-spangled mists, and Suzanne’s just-kidding wordplay never stops, though receiving a secret message from an old movie on TV is a new low point. Eventually, Suzanne will be released into a happy ending: a kinda sorta reunion with Leland.
The satirical swipes at Tinseltown are missing here, apart from that funeral scene. The rest is all Suzanne, and she’s just not interesting enough to sustain the attention.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2004
ISBN: 0-684-80913-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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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