Customer Reviews

Shining City: A Novel

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Life for Marcus Ripps is becoming complicated. Marcus, the production manager for a toy company, has a huge mortgage, ever increasing bills, and an elaborate bar mitzvah to finance. His wife Jan is entangled in a business venture that isn't making any money and their sex life is suffering because of it. His live-in mother-in-law is ailing and facing surgery with no insurance. When Marcus's boss announces that the plant is moving to China and he must relocate to keep his job, it seems as if there are no easy answers. Marcus needs to find a way to take care of his family, but he can't find employment and the money is dwindling. Then he gets the news that his misanthrope brother Julian has died. Marcus and Julian weren't close, but it seems that Julian has left him an inheritance. It's a dry cleaning business, and it's the answer to his financial woes. But while investigating his new acquisition, Marcus discovers that the business is a front for a prostitution ring, complete with the women, the clients, and an offbeat Russian gangsta henchman. Initially, Marcus wrestles with his conscience about the change in fortune: how can a middle class dad become a pimp? But the family's needs outweigh his concerns, and he jumps in headfirst. What ensues is the strange and fantastic story of Shining City. Marcus strives to be an ethical pimp, offering his girls 401k plans and health insurance, book clubs and paid vacations. But despite his good intentions, the byproducts of the lifestyle begin to creep into the business. Soon Marcus must deal with threatening bodyguards, a rival pimp, and an attempt on his life. But as he discovers, it's too easy to stay in, and much too unrewarding to get out, plus he still has a bar mitzvah to pay for! The stakes get ridiculously high, and Marcus must decide if he should abandon his new venture before trouble ultimately finds him.

The story told in this book was wickedly funny and wonderfully inventive. I found myself giggling throughout the ride, never being able to predict the twists and turns to come. The subplot involving Plum, Jan's business partner who wants get pregnant and have a child so she could videotape the full experience for an avant-garde art piece, was so bizarrely comical that I marveled at the author's ingenious imagination. Though the book dealt with the touchy subject of prostitution, it was not vulgar or crass in the depiction of the business. The focus, rather, was on Marcus and his experiences with the women and the conundrums he faced as a result of his decisions. The book was exceedingly clever and creative, never missing the punch line, and it sustained the humor throughout. It was pitch perfect, and wildly divergent from most other humorous offerings I've read.

Marcus was a very engaging character. Though pushed into a life of crime, he had all the family values that made him respectable. He was a loving and faithful husband, a doting father and a loving son-in-law. He read philosophy, struggled to understand his new circumstances, and dealt with dishonorable people honorably. I liked Marcus so much that it was easy to accept his moral slide. Marcus's incredulity at his situation combined with his self-effacing attitude made his plight affecting and interesting. Marcus was a genuine character and was easy to relate to. Some of the funniest sections of the book occur as a running monologue in his head when he is faced with perplexities.

One of the things that I found impressive about this book was the level of complexity each character had. From Marcus's pole dancing mother-in-law to the devout lesbian rabbi, each was constructed with abundant detail and expertise. The ability of the author to create such meaty characters took it to a greater level of storytelling that I found fascinating. I wanted more strangeness and idiosyncrasy, and the author delivered abundantly.

I enjoyed this atypical and creative story. The narrative propelled itself along in a very unexpected and diverting way that made it an easy and pleasurable read. It managed to be amusing, while not being trite. I would definitely recommend this book to those who would like an entertaining summer read.

Marcus Ripps, the main protagonist of this novel, through a series of life`s unexpected turns, finds his niche in the most unlikeliest of places. In the process he becomes a type of new age management consultant in a world of wh*res and pimps and criminals even as he attempts to successfully run an underground escort service called the Shining City "Dry Cleaner," left to him by Julian, his older brother who as the story opens has abruptly expired from a heart attack.

Marcus' story begins in the hardscrabble neighborhood Van Nuys, Los Angeles, "a gamey corner of the San Fernando Valley" where he lives with his loving wife Jan, their son, Nathan, and Jan's mother Lenore who has come to live with the family because of her ailing health.

When Marcus isn't spending his time dipping into age-old philosophy texts to focus his mind, he's trying to desperately to vent a will to mediocrity that just doesn't seem to be working. When his job as production manager for Wazoo, a toy manufacturing business goes belly-up, little does Marcus know that he is about to be about to be sucked into the maelstrom of global progress, even as he turns down a lucrative offer to manage the company in China from "the God of Unbridled money," his boss, Room Primus.

Even Jan, who runs Ripcord, an alternative clothing boutique with her best friend Plum, is having trouble keeping her head above rocky financial waters. Ripcord, with its constant mercantile demands is just not providing the creative outlet Jan craved; and then there's the difficulties with Plum who decides she wants to have a baby to add to a piece of video art. No matter who much she gets rejected in the art world, Plum's desire to make art remains undiminished.


So with the pounding heat of a Los Angeles summer acting as a fiery backdrop, Marcus begins his operation, attacking his new found career with a type of unbridled optimism even as he battles becoming a "miscreant and a procurer of human flesh." No longer forced to argue with Jan over being 80,000 in debt, The Ripps even enough money to pay for Nathan's tuition at Winthrop Hall, a prestigious private school that's a hothouse of ambition, over-achievement and large investment portfolios.

Although Marcus can't begin to divine Julian's intention with his ludicrous last will and testament, he remains grateful for what his brother had done and makes plans for his "girls "to be treat as individuals and with dignity, content to enforce a caring management style. After all, life for Marcus and his family is sure to go into a new direction, the time short, lucrative and sweet..

A true Los Angeles story, author Seth Greenland gradually introduces us to the major players, a foamy mélange of characters as Marcus' begins his tumultuous journey into the LA flesh trade: There's Amstel a blond beauty from Eastern Europe whose past work as a prostitute comes back to haunt Marcus in unexpected ways; and also Kostya who served as a driver, personal assistant, and general factotum for Julian and who ends up helping Marcus shoulder much of the day- to-day operation of the business.

But at the center of it all is Marcus - and later Jan - who when she finds out about her husband's lucrative escapade, attacks the operation with a new type of gusto, working to increase their revenues and reposition the business as they aim for a more exclusive clientele, while also trying to keep themselves below the radar of the law.

Naïve by nature, the Ripps`, just don't think that the skin trade maybe connected to the criminal underworld, where the freaky clients can be alive at one moment and dead at the next and where pimps and their girls can sometimes have difficulty separating reality from fantasy. Toss in Plum as a self-confessed dominatrix and a trip to dump the body of a client in the Los Angeles forest, along with a sex toy in the form a vibrating egg with a chip in it - and Marcus indeed gets to play in play in this dirty - but always irreverently funny - underworld. Mike Leonard July 08.

From the first page of Seth Greenland's new novel Shining City, I was hooked. It was sharp, hilarious, timely, and simply fun to read--a scathing satire with a warm, cuddly heart-filled middle.

I recommended it in my July 9 review for Lei Chic, a daily email magazine in Hawaii, wherein I remark that "Greenland's exacting characterization and pithy descriptions cleverly position this ludicrous plot somewhere between a laugh-out-loud farce and an illuminating portrait of modern society's moral ironies and unbelievable dilemmas. [It's] the perfect novel for a time when To pimp or not to pimp? is everybody's real-life question."
-Christine Thomas, Lei Chic

Read the entire review here:
[...]

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.

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.

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.

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!

In this slim and mildly amusing send-up of contemporary culture, writer Seth Greenland starts with a knockout premise: a down-on-his-luck nobody opens what he calls a "family-values" escort service, one where the ladies are treated with respect and get a good dental plan to boot. Unfortunately the joke wears thin fast and Greenland resorts to the standard contrived plot twists and cast of quirky characters, including a pole-dancing, pot-smoking grandmother. (That character reappears to ever-diminishing returns as well.) Worst of all, for a wannabe page-turner along the lines of a Carl Hiassen novel, "Shining City" lacks any real menace, suspense or danger. The most entertaining and enduring satirists and their works -- I'm thinking of Mark Twain or some of the humor that runs through Elmore Leonard's crime fiction -- show a fearlessness and ability to tap into the times. Greenland recycles more than a few gags, occasionally underlines points for the reader, and seems to be indulging an in-joke by dropping obviously French words into the story, and I'm not talking about those that have worked their way into common usage like "sangfroid" or "bon mot" or "dishabille," all of which Greenland manages to use in a four-page span, but obscure ones like "droit du seigneur."

Greenland's book really is a funny read. Expecting more than the gentle humor and funny plot points might lead to disappointment, but the book scores somewhat high for humor.

The most marvelous thing about Greenland's novel of an average guy who accidentally becomes a pimp is the juxtaposition of his eloquent vocabulary and the somewhat crass subject matter. Greenland describes the nature of Marcus' business in such poetic terms that you forget you're reading about golden showers and bondage. Marcus ruminates extensively about the moral implications of his new enterprise, wondering what kind of example he is setting for his son, while also being able to provide so much better for him. What is the right thing to do here?
The narrative is also populated with a plethora of fascinating secondary characters: Marcus' pole-dancing mother-in-law, Amstel, a prostitute who reads minimalist short stories, a Russian 'driver' who speaks in hip-hop slang and wants to open a rib restaurant... and so many more.
An amusing, informative, and thoroughly enjoyable book; Shining City is highly recommended.