Amazon.com Review
In John Ed Bradley's well-wrought page-turner, doom hovers over every encounter. Sonny LaMott is a down-and-out painter in New Orleans, selling bad portraits to tourists for $40 a pop. Years ago the city seemed romantic and important to him, a place fit for a Tennessee Williams backdrop. These days all that has turned into cliché. Everything he paints looks like something from a gift shop postcard. The real reason for Sonny's cynicism becomes clear in a scene where he watches a porn video starring the object of his adolescent desire: 15 years later, Juliet Beauvais, his femme fatale and first love, has gone into hardcore. When she returns to New Orleans unexpectedly, Sonny falls quickly under her spell again. The novel's tension resides with Juliet and her wild appeal: she can make men grovel at her feet, even kill for her. Determined to whack her mother and collect her inheritance, Juliet manipulates Sonny, trying to convince him that he's not really a cheesy artist--he's a glamorous hit man. And she's not really a drug-addled porn star, she's the woman who will save his life.
With My Juliet John Ed Bradley (Tupelo Nights, Love and Obits) proves he has a gift for crazy women. While most hard-boiled writers of this genre, including masters like James Ellroy, tend to dodge the interior lives of their screwed-up ladies, he paints a rich portrait of a woman on the edge--narcissistic, deeply damaged, unable to find peace or pleasure. She's also funny, complaining to herself that it's "oppressively, stupidly hot," and thumbing through a self-help book she finds on an airplane, "she reads half a page before encountering a trash can on the main concourse and throwing it away." Juliet doesn't believe in self-help or redemption; she believes in money, sex, her own powers of persuasion. Bradley makes her chillingly believable, and she's the one who propels this novel's atmosphere of guilt, doom, and dark pleasure. --Emily White
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
No New Orleans story is complete without murder, sex and family secrets, and Bradley (Tupelo Nights) amply supplies all three in this moody, sadly comic novel, his first in six years. Juliet Beauvais, 32, is the prodigal daughter of a waning aristocratic family whose patriarch, Juliet's father, died many years ago under mysterious circumstances. After a 15-year exile, she hears that her mother is moribund, and gleefully returns to Nawlins to collect her inheritance. Problem is, her mother isn't really sick at all: it was just a trick to get Juliet away from Los Angeles, where she'd been working in porn films. Disappointed and flat broke, Juliet is forced to confront (i.e., have sex with) the men from her past, including a bisexual sax player, a one-legged petty crook and a down-on-his-luck painter named Sonny LaMott, who's been obsessed with Juliet since they went steady in high school. Inevitably, LaMott still can't resist her. But Juliet proves to be less interested in LaMott than she is in claiming her birthright and uncovering the secret behind her father's death. Both eventually come to pass, though not in ways she expectsAJuliet's ultimate fate is tragic but unsurprising, at least to anyone familiar with Blanche DuBois. In fact, the novel pays a self-conscious homage to Tennessee Williams, and if Bradley is unable to duplicate the playwright's masterful atmosphere, he still manages to muster some evocative observations. An affected kiss is "the sort of half-felt gesture that college sorority girls, too sophisticated for handshakes, reward each other for just being wonderful." At time the depravity seems to be piled a bit highAhow much drug abuse, pedophilia and kinky sex is really necessary?Abut for the most part, Bradley's seamy story is balanced by enough witty dialogue and lush scenery to make a wild, suspenseful and ultimately bittersweet read. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
