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 enlarge | Author: Seth Greenland
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Category: Book
List Price: $24.99
Buy New: $11.35
You Save: $13.64 (55%)
New (39) Used (12) from $9.70
Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 344024
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.2
ISBN: 1596915048
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781596915046
ASIN: 1596915048
Publication Date: July 8, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 The funniest book of the year --- you will howl August 12, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I have, at long last, read a new novel I wish I'd written.
I knew from the very first two sentences:
Julian Ripps was too fat to be reclining in a hot tub between a pair of naked women, unless he was very rich or they were prostitutes. He wasn't, but they were.
But all is not well in the hot tub next to the infinity pool on the flagstone deck high above Los Angeles. The hookers depart, leaving Julian to deal with the aftermath of a two cheeseburger dinner and the possibility --- no, the likelihood --- of a criminal indictment for money laundering. The myocardial infarction hits him in the tub, and, four pages into Shining City, he's dead.
We next find ourselves in the ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hotel, site of a Bar Mitzvah. As you might expect, there are chocolate fountains and a Vanity Fair photographer and guests who behave "as if they were at a fund-raiser that just happened to feature klezmer music during the cocktail hour." The father had his corporate communications guys write his speech, the kids get henna tattoos, and the music starts with the voice of a rapper "whose shrewdest career move involved getting shot." But it's the "motivational dancer" on each arm of the Bar Mitzvah boy that signals we are in the hands of a comic master. And in case we're slow on the uptake, consider the chapter's end, as everyone dances --- "in a celebratory mosh".
It gets better. Among the guests at the Bar Mitzvah are Marcus Ripps, brother of the dead pimp, and his wife Jan. They live in Van Nuys. He's had a dull managerial job at a novelty toy factory for fifteen years. She owns Ripcord, a moribund boutique. Their son's on scholarship at an exclusive private school where "a sixth-grader was selling his Ritalin to a high school sophomore." They're being crushed by an $80,000 home equity loan. They haven't made love for a month, and when Marcus, in frustration, tries to part Jan's thighs, it's "like trying to crack a safe that had no combination."
Very quickly --- Greenland is not one for pretty flights of prose that an editor dare not remove --- the factory closes. ("To everything there is a season: a time to expand, a time to downsize, a time to move the entire operation to the Far East.") But when a door closes, another opens, this time to Shining City, a dry cleaner on Melrose --- Julian has bequeathed it to the unsuspecting Marcus. (They had not been close: "Marcus remembered Julian as someone who took the noble out of savage.")
Marcus visits the establishment. A woman walks in and gives him an envelope filled with cash. Slowly, he realizes. The lawyer hadn't told him Julian was a "pip" --- he'd said "pimp". And now Marcus can be that guy. It was "a disorienting sensation, as if he'd been exploring a Pacific atoll and had come upon a production of Porgy and Bess being performed by a cast of house cats."
I don't want to spoil the fun for you, so let me just point out that --- unless you are a devout believer in almost any religion --- you will have a hard time seeing Marcus and Jan as "bad" people for what they do next. Indeed, even if you are morality incarnate, you have a hard time keeping a straight face as Greenland serves up hilarious scene after hilarious scene.
For Marcus and Jan are, like many of us, just trying to hold it together, make it through and leave a little something for their kid. But how do you deal with a naked corpse handcuffed to a bed?
Beneath our thin veneer of personality, Greenland suggests, lies an equally thin veneer of self. That's not a judgment, it's just how it is for besieged suburban American families --- and many others. You can get all dreary about that, or you can write a book with killer lines and credibly funny scenes. And a pimp you can love? Believe it.
Seth Greenland has the typing fingers of a Dominican shortstop. He's fast and sure, and if he's a little slick toward the end, you won't hold it against him. You'll be too busy laughing.
Read this book! August 3, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Were it not for Mr. Nemeth's scintillating review (and for having paid for the book), this reader would not have continued beyond Shining City's introductory quirky, abrasive chapters. But then. But then. The story line grips, up to and including its Sturm und Drang apogee. And then the finish.
Ahhh!
"The Way We Live Now" July 26, 2008
11 out of 15 found this review helpful
Most reviewers have justly praised the verbal wit and irony which propel this work forward at breakneck speed. Greenland, whose past credits include screen and playwriting, here produces some of the funniest, allusively rich lines since the heyday of Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Gimlet- eyed but high-spirited, he describes a woman who's let her eating habits get the better of her as a "Cezanne pear." In the same vein, he draws contemporary bar mitzvahs as overly lavish, present-producing, wholly secular events. When he presents "the out-of-towner Sunday brunch ...[as] a bar mitzvah tradition that, while appearing nowhere in the Torah, had become very popular in southern California," it's awfully difficult not to roar with laughter from shocks of recognition. What has not been sufficiently praised in this memorable comic novel, though, is the seriousness of its subtext, one which concerns the losses of civilized traditions and their attendant ethical systems. Greenland's southern California has become a place where the only thing diverse individuals or their families any longer have in common is a lust for money-making.
If a reader accepts the traditional judgment that comedy is a far sadder art than tragedy, since the latter genre is inclined to reveal sparks of nobility in the most unlikely persons, whereas comedy usually features reprobates who rarely change (think Malvolio or Shylock), author Greenland in his drawing of one Marcus Ripps, a guy going from bad choice to worse, has created a memorable, contemporary addition to the classic comic pantheon.
The title of the book wittily alludes to the initial Puritan dream, the creation in America of a shining city atop a hill. In the novel, however, we're in contemporary southern California where through comic reduction to absurdity Shining City has become the name of an ersatz dry cleaning establishment, touting the cleanliness next to godliness at its front door, but being in fact in its inner recesses a brothel. The satiric theme of the novel is that for the main characters money isn't everything; only a lot of money is! For such characters, all entrepreneurs of a sort, and representative inhabitants of both California and modern America, making a living and providing for one's family by just about any means are the highest realities. "The business of America is business," we were told long ago, but Greenland raises the question of whether business practices have ever been or currently are necessarily exalted activities. In a contemporary application, he details how common integrity in daily life has become for his central characters a prohibitive luxery. Their lives are wholly given over to aggrandizement for themselves and their immediate families. Such is the narrow extent of their societal concerns, as even contributions to charity become a means of self-promotion and showing off. Though wars and other disasters are repeatedly featured on the TV screens mentioned in the novel, such events fail to register with the characters as important or even noticeable. This disturbingly sad perception of characters sunk within their own circumferences is at the root of the novel's ebullient, satiric wit.
Jane Austen said of "Pride and Prejudice" that it was "light, bright, and sparkling." "Shining City," a current manners novel, might be described as "light, DARK, and sparkling." Again, for its characters, just about whatever one does to rake in big bucks becomes acceptable. This is a novel about characters who rationalize their bad choices and are in the main blinded by a self-deception that takes the breath away. Marcus Ripps, for instance, the main character who inherits the dry cleaners cum brothel, provides his call girls with health insurance and 401Ks, thinking thereby he's turned pandering into a relatively respectable activity. Greenland's insights on "the way we live now" turn out by and large as too true to be good.
Moves like a house-afire; highly entertaining July 18, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
With its Elmore Leonard-like groove and its relatable, good-guy hero, SHINING CITY it one of the most entertaining books I've stumbled upon this year. The book's at its best when its satiric, sexy humor makes the reader think: what's a moral person to do when following the rules results in crushing debt and a strain on those depending on one? How far would I push the lines of morality to keep my family well-fed and secure?
I laughed out loud a number of times and absolutely couldn't put down the book until I'd turned the last pages, less than a day after receiving it. I plan to recommend it to friends and have already told my spouse "You have to read this."
So why four stars and not five? Some of the humor seemed a little stock (the pot-smoking, pole-dancing grandma didn't cut it for me, though the dreadlocked, gangsta-speaking Russian with the barbecue dreams cracked me up) and I the ending, while satisfying, felt a little contrived. Minor flaws in a terrific read, though. SHINING CITY is one heck of a ride.
 Good book but not really funny July 15, 2008
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
I read this book because it got a really good review somewhere (I can't remember where) and because the premise seemed kind of humorous.
The problem is that this book isn't funny. It tries to be. But the humor is way too dry to be witty. It is almost like that author is on one hand trying to write good fiction and explore the characters inner lives and nuances and on the other hand trying to tell jokes. The problem is that he never really succeeds at either. The light touch needed for humor hampers character pathos, and vice versa.
As an example, consider the character of the mother in law. On one hand she is a half blind, pot smoking, pole dancer which frankly has comic potential. But beyond one point when she is smoking up with Marcus' other pimp driver the author never really takes us outside of plausibility. Or let me put it this way. I know grannies who have tried pole dancing to keep fit. I know people with medical problems who do pot. Conceivably the juxtaposition of these things could be funny if at a certain point ridicule is allowed to run rampant, however simply having a person with these characteristics doesn't funny make. A smile make maybe, but not uproarious laughter.
Still this is a good book. I liked the people, I liked the situation, I even thought the ethical dilemma was fun. And just because I didn't laugh out loud even once doesn't mean I didn't smile a couple times.
Fun light reading and I might even track down his earlier book "The Bones"
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