Genuinely engrossing and utterly creepy, but White Trash suffers badly from a two-dimensional villain (an agitprop meanie...
Depressing fable of 21st-century Britain takes us inside the warped and febrile mind of a free-market psychopath—in this first US appearance for English author King.
Jonathan Jeffreys is the sort of upper-class villain we’ve met before in the novels of Bret Easton Ellis or films of Mike Leigh: nihilistic, demented, well-connected, well-dressed, and utterly devoid of conscience. A management consultant who specializes in hospital administration, Jeffreys serves as a government inspector, evaluating the efficiency of various hospital facilities and programs. Although he despises unions and looks down on the lower classes as ignorant rabble, Jeffreys is suavely diplomatic and manages to inspire trust and even a kind of affection in the underpaid workers whose jobs he sets out to eliminate. One of these is Ruby James, a nurse at one of the hospitals Jeffreys has come to streamline. Like most of the hospital staff, Ruby sees Jeffreys only as a quiet and polite man who works extremely long hours and keeps largely to himself. It doesn’t occur to her to wonder whether there has been a noticeable increase in patient deaths since Jeffreys arrived, or whether there’s anything unusual in his wandering through remote wards by himself late at night. When Ron Dawes, a retired union organizer whom Ruby looked after in her ward, dies somewhat suddenly one night, Jeffreys makes a point of consoling Ruby (who had grown fond of the old guy). But how much comfort is there in the condolences of a man who, as a child, used to torture his pet dog and likes to relax by urinating into the mouths of prostitutes? And will Ruby be able to sense threat before it turns into full-fledged danger?
Genuinely engrossing and utterly creepy, but White Trash suffers badly from a two-dimensional villain (an agitprop meanie who could have been named Mr. Capitalist), as well as from the colorless normal characters who oppose him.Pub Date: April 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-09-928306-9
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Vintage UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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