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Jonathan Dee (2) (1962–)

Teoksen The Privileges tekijä

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8+ teosta 1,485 jäsentä 120 arvostelua 3 Favorited

Tietoja tekijästä

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Tekijän teokset

The Privileges (2010) 698 kappaletta
A Thousand Pardons (2013) 320 kappaletta
The Locals (2017) 237 kappaletta
Palladio (2002) 110 kappaletta
Sugar Street (2022) 63 kappaletta
The Liberty Campaign (1993) 34 kappaletta
St. Famous (1995) 14 kappaletta
The Lover of History (1990) 9 kappaletta

Associated Works

Merkitty avainsanalla

Yleistieto

Kanoninen nimi
Dee, Jonathan
Syntymäaika
1962
Sukupuoli
male
Kansalaisuus
USA
Koulutus
Yale University
Organisaatiot
Paris Review

Jäseniä

Kirja-arvosteluja

I was disappointed. After all the good reviews, I thought I would enjoy this book. It started out great but it fizzled fairly early on. There were too many unlikeable characters for me, the daughter, her awful friend, and the movie star to name a few. It was difficult to care about characters like that. Also, I know it's fiction but a middle aged woman, who hadn't held a job in years, not only gets 4 interviews on her first try but gets hired all in the same day? It's quite a fantasy in today's world.… (lisätietoja)
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
ellink | 45 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Jan 22, 2024 |
Very enjoyable noir about a man on the run. You learn little about what he did, where he's from, you just have him, living quietly day-to-day.
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
thisisstephenbetts | 8 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Nov 25, 2023 |
The best thing about the Privileges, far and away, is the opening scene (which lasts for about the first 20% of the book, so not trivial) Dee opens on the wedding between two relatively normal people with big ambitions and focuses on their interactions with each other, their friends, their parents and their siblings. In this microcosm of their relationship, each character is nuanced and each interaction is deftly painted: the overbearing mother, the chronically late spoiled rich kid, the "alternative" step-sister who is SO over this. It's funny and relatable. (This scene deserves all the stars, so I'm going to keep this a three star review, instead of two, which is what the rest of the book deserves.)

And then...it's like when you meet someone and you have this great conversation with them and you have so much in common and you imagine this entire friendship spreading out before you, but then the next time you get together they spout vaguely offensive views and only want to talk about football and you realize you don't actually have anything in common? The first amazing scene is what makes the rest of the lackluster book hurt so much. Because everything else is lackluster. It's not bad, certainly, but it's just boring. Flat as paper characters wander around their super rich life, with their super perfect marriage to each other. And as much as there's no characterization, there's not really plot either. Yes, things happen, but they aren't related to each other and they result in no change upon the flimsy characters. Dee is trying to make a point about wealth and all of his characters and plot are servants to his point.

This book is basically a fable about wealth, but it's not even clear to me what point about wealth Dee is trying to make. There's the disaffected rich girl and the boy who's rich but want's to be a Trustafarian and then the rich woman who devotes her time to charities, but apparently earnestly so, and the rich man who maybe cheated the system to get rich, but then the book implies later that he continued to get rich even after he stopped insider-trading. And there's a very short bit about the hypocrisy of supporting charities while getting rich off of factories in China, which was interesting, but only lasted about two paragraphs.


Finally, the last 20% made me want to tear my hair out. For no good reason that I can understand, Dee decides to intercut three different threads, for over 50 pages. Intercutting is a literary technique that can drive me crazy at the best of times, but intercutting that many scenes, which were totally unrelated for that long was a special sort of obnoxious. The intercuts came quickly enough that it was hard to get into any scene, and since there were three other stories to cut into, you lost all emotional resonance with the first one by the time you got back to it. (For the record, just to help emphasize the bizarreness, the threads were:

-the son becomes takes an art class, becomes involved with his TA, who is into outsider art; he becomes fascinated by outsider art; he eventually tries to meet an artist; he gets kidnapped; he escapes)
-the daughter goes to a nightclub and gets drunk. She gets picked up by some "EuroTrash" guys. They crash her parents beach house. They party and wreck the house. They drive home and get into a car crash. Her parents punish her by making her dad take her with him on his business trip to China. They go to China. They visit a factory and she thinks it's hypocritical that her dad invests in a factory in China (even though none of the real problems with Chinese labor are actually on view here -- it seems to be a factory staffed exclusively by adults and teenagers, without any apparent bad labor conditions.)
-The mother's father is dying in a hospice. She's called by the father's girlfriend, whom she didn't know existed. She flies to Florida, where he is. She sits at his bedside. She pays the father's girlfriend to go away. The father eventually dies.

Now imagine reading those plots 3 to 4 pages at a time, separated by 10 pages of other stuff.
… (lisätietoja)
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
settingshadow | 50 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Aug 19, 2023 |
After her husband Ben commits and illegal and scandalous act, stay-at-home mom Helen divorces him and finds she must support herself and their adopted Chinese daughter Sara, age 12. Without any particular education or experience, Helen looks into a job at a decrepit PR firm, and discovers she has a talent for crisis management, or, more particularly, for helping people to apologize in a way that seems sincere.

In an interview the author states, "To me, A Thousand Pardons is a book not about spin or scandal or PR or even forgiveness, but about religious heritage." He further states, "It would be going way too far to say I wanted the novel to be a parable, but I wanted it to have some formal aspects of a parable....Parables are short and sweet; they move only forward from event to event, as you say; they don't contain flashbacks or other devices for reordering time; there's no pause in them for re-election or commentary or explorations of meaning."

And that is as good a description of this book as any. We follow Helen and Sara as she moves forward with her life, as she deals with others who also have scandal and/or crisis in their lives, and as she decides how to move forward with or without Ben. Another interesting and well-written book by Jonathan Dee with richly portrayed characters.

3 stars.
… (lisätietoja)
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
arubabookwoman | 45 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Aug 16, 2023 |

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Tilastot

Teokset
8
Also by
2
Jäseniä
1,485
Suosituimmuussija
#17,291
Arvio (tähdet)
½ 3.4
Kirja-arvosteluja
120
ISBN:t
152
Kielet
10
Kuinka monen suosikki
3

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