Description
“A seductive page turner.” — The New York Times Book Review “A triumph.” — The Boston Globe “A powerful novel of murder and sexual obsession. . . .xa0Chilling.” — The Star-Ledger Joyce Maynard (b. 1953) is the bestselling author of eleven books of fiction and nonfiction. She is best known for her memoir At Home in the World and her novel Labor Day, both bestsellers. Maynard launched her writing career as a teenager with the 1972 New York Times Magazine cover story “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life.” She went on to contribute hundreds of essays and columns for publications such as Vogue ; More ; O, The Oprah Magazine ; the New York Times ; and many essay collections. The mother of three grown children, Maynard now lives in Northern California, where, in addition to continuing her career as a writer and speaker, she performs regularly as a storyteller with the Moth and Porchlight series. She also runs the Lake Atitlán Writing Workshop in a small Mayan village on the shores of Lake Atitlán, Guatemala. From Publishers Weekly Taking her inspiration from a recent murder trial, Maynard ( Baby Love ) reimagines the protagonists in fictional form: 22-year-old Suzanne Maretto, a pathologically self-absorbed, ruthlessly ambitious would-be TV journalist, and the three high school misfits she recruits to kill her husband so that she can be free to pursue her chosen career. Using short vignettes related by 24 characters involved in the incident--parents, neighbors, a high school principal, even Phil Donahue--Maynard attempts to show how Suzanne could gull all three fatherless, poverty-stricken teenagers into committing murder for her sake. While carefully thought out and constructed, the narrative is only partially convincing. Although she does a good job of conveying Suzanne's low intelligence in monologues replete with pretentious errors ("myself having been a very different sort of individual"), Maynard fails both to make the voices of other characters sound genuine and to differentiate among them. In addition, Suzanne is so singleminded, manipulative and obtuse that she is essentially a caricature. Maynard is, however, more deft in her portrayal of our pervasive, pernicious TV culture, especially its influence on the lower middle class. Though Maynard's imagined ending is a cop-out, those not familiar with the outlines of the original case may find the novel absorbing. First serial to Penthouse; Literary Guild selection . Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Kirkus Reviews Perky, aspiring newscaster Suzanne Maretto persuades her teenaged lover and his buddy to kill her straight-arrow husband; just deserts follow for all. Suzanne, who thinks that ``if people could just be on TV all the time, the whole human race would probably be a much better group of individuals,'' sets out to captivate the none-too-bright kids she's interviewing for a demo tape that'll get her out of her local (suburban Boston) station and onto the network fast track. There's Jimmy Emmet, who worships her as stupidly as does her hapless restaurant-family husband Larry; Russell Hines, who's just in it for the thousand dollars; and Lydia Mertz, who's so hopelessly smitten with Suzanne's big-sister glamour that she's willing to supply the gun. But the real culprits, as bestselling author/media-child Maynard (Baby Love, 1981; Domestic Affairs, 1987, etc.) keeps screaming in an amusingly flat series of self-revealing monologues, are Malibu Barbie, Victoria's Secret, Wheel of Fortune, abusive (or adoring) parents, and Donahue--all the accoutrements of cut-rate acculturation that give her characters such venal dreams and mindless determination. Maynard's ear for sincere garbage (``We're so connected, I can taste her Tic Tac,'' boasts Jimmy after Suzanne deflowers him) is as sharp as ever, but after 50 pages of such homogeneous stuff you'll start looking for the exit--unless, of course, your own taste for pulp romances of sex, power, and violence are just as depraved as the ones so lovingly excoriated here. What's most offensive here, as in Bret Easton Ellis's notorious American Psycho, is the raised-nostril pretense that this revolted attack on pop culture, already due for serialization in Penthouse, stands above it all. A more penetrating writer could have a field day analyzing recent popular fiction's disavowal of the tawdry culture that continues to grip it as tightly as Suzanne holds Jimmy. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Read more
Features & Highlights
- “A seductive page-turner” about a murderously ambitious cable-news star by the
- New York Times
- –bestselling author of
- Labor Day
- (
- The New York Times Book Review
- ).
- Local weather reporter Suzanne Maretto craves nothing more than to transcend life at her suburban cable television news station and follow in the footsteps of her idol: Barbara Walters. When she concludes that her unglamorous husband is getting in the way of her dream of stardom, the solution seems obvious: Get rid of him. She seduces a fifteen-year-old admirer, Jimmy, and persuades him to do her dirty work. Mission accomplished, Suzanne takes to the airwaves in her new role as grieving widow, in search of a TV deal. If that means selling Jimmy down the river, she’s ready. Maynard’s brilliant, funny, and groundbreaking novel—adapted by Gus Van Sant into the cult classic movie of the same name, starring Nicole Kidman—was first published in 1992 before the era of manufactured stardom and the phenomenon of televised murder trials as entertainment. The book still stands as a razor-sharp satire of celebrity-fixated culture and the American obsession with TV—a novel that imagined the phenomenon of reality television before its creation, with alternately bone-chilling and hilarious accuracy.
- This ebook features an illustrated biography of Joyce Maynard including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.
