The Big Picture

Rating:
Summary: More, Mr. Kennedy, More!!
Review: i have two criticisms of 'the big picture'---1)douglas
kennedy uses the word 'vertiginous' too often and 2)i
don't have any idea how the protaganist ben bradford/
gary summers didn't explode from all the booze and food
he drank and ate..
otherwise, what a helluva book! i've read both of
mr. kennedy's books over the holidays and would gladly
stay up thru the night to read anything this guy writes...
more, mr. kennedy, more! i have such admiration for authors
like you who can weave such tremendous reads.
even a bad book by this author would be better reading than
most writers' best works (and, no, i'm not related to him nor have i ever met him). read douglas kennedy's work---if you want to read the best to come down the pike in a long while. bar none.

Rating:
Summary: A Second Chance at Leading the Life You Wanted
Review: This book helps live at the fantasy that many of us have. Each of us has a talent that we may pursue as a hobby but toil at something that makes money. Sometimes we are afraid to pursue the hobby because we are afraid of failure.

Ben the main character is someone who is obsessed with photography as a hobby, while toiling as a Wall St. lawyer by day. His wife loved writing but failed at it and now lives a miserable existence as a housewife to Ben. This only re-enforces Ben's resolve to not try his hand at the art he loves (photography) because he might fail too. Ben's wife is miserable because she blames her failure on Ben and also blames Ben for taking her away from the "arty" lifestyle she had dreamed of following. As a result, she develops a relationship with another man and decides to end her marriage.

This other man happens to be a photographer who is trying to land his first break. Ben learns of their relationship and goes to confront the other man. An argument ensues and Ben kills the other man in a fit of anger. Ben sees his only was to escape being caught is to assume the identity of the dead man and move to another part of the country. In the blink of an eye Ben's actions have forced him to become that photographer he always wanted to be.

I don't want to give too much more away of the plot except to say that Ben does find success as a photographer but wishes he had back the life he didn't want before.

It was very difficult to put this book down. The characters are well developed and the book moves along at a pace that never gets boring. If Mr. Kennedy writes a few more books like this one I am sure he will be a name that all of us remember!

Rating:
Summary: It sounds so reasonable
Review: following the story of the young lawyer Ben and his life in a New York suburb with wife and Kids, you begin to feel like him. His real passion is the photography, but his life despite the business success becomes more and more unsatisfactory.
A split of a second will change it all. How he setup the plot is amazing but is reasonable. The new life is different and exciting but it will last long....
This was my first book of Douglas Kennedy and could not stop reading it. It will not be my last one of him.

Rating:
Summary: Fast Paced Reading!!!
Review: I got this based on a recommendation from a friend. This was a good reading from LAX to JFK (red-eye).

Rating:
Summary: A Real Page-Turner To The End
Review: This is quite simply the best novel I've read in years! I couldn't put it down. After this one, you'll be sleep deprived, but thrilled and looking for more from Douglas Kennedy.

Rating:
Summary: The story is not new
Review: The story is not new, Patricia Highsmith used a similar plot in her first Ripley novel. But it`s definitely well done until the protagonist comes to Montana. After that it seems as if a different author completed writing the book, there`s not as much suspense as was in the first part of the book. Nevertheless it`s a very compelling story.

Rating:
Summary: The Big Picture
Review: The book, The Big Picture, is thrilling and keeps you on the edge of your seat through out. Although the main character participates in acts that are unforgivable you can not help but root for him. The story is about a man name Ben Bradford who is a Wall Street banker and lives in a nice home with his wife and two kids, but he soon realizes the hard way that money can not buy happiness. Ben learns that his wife is having an affair with a neighbor and is thinking of breaking up the family. Coming to terms with being the man he swore he would never become leads him to a confrontation with his wife's lover. The meeting between the two men turns ugly and Ben ends up murdering and stealing the identity of Gary Summers. Soon after he closes the deal by faking his own death in a boating accident using Gary's body. Ben leaves town as Gary and begins a road trip to Montana. In Mountain Falls he starts to take pictures for the local newspaper called The Montanan. He gets settled in an apartment and befriends a columnist, Rudy Warren, and the photo editor, Anne Ames, at the paper. Ben wakes up to a fire one morning while away at a cabin with Anne and is able to take pictures of the devastation that become nationally recognized. Ordinarily this is a good thing for a struggling photographer but when you are trying to keep your really identity a secret exposure is a bad thing. Rudy Warren discovers the truth about Ben's cover up and tries to black mail him. The two men are driving drunk down to the cabin when they get into a car accident and Rudy dies. Being they were in Ben's car the police figured he was driving and Gary had died. Ben takes yet another identity and confesses everything to Anne. The couple stays together, and Ben Bradford finally gets the life he always wanted.

Rating:
Summary: Compelling novel by a very talented writer
Review: The Big Picture, while classified as a "thriller" by some, and having a big promotional campaign behind it (700,000 first printing) surprised me as a compelling work by a truly gifted author. I hadn't read a book that excited me in quite some time, the "literary' books" I've been reading lately of the sort that generally put me to sleep by page 50. But Kennedy's book pulls you in and, while slow at times in the middle of the book, and although in at least one instance the coincidences in the story are close to unbelievable, the story gets you in the can't stop-reading-mode toward the end. It's a fascinating examination on how a single moment in one's life can change that life forever; the reader hungers to find out whether the main character can survive the gravest of mistakes and, in the process, "find himself", too, despite all the pains and regrets the biggest of mistakes possible has caused him. A first-rate novel.

Rating:
Summary: Above average potboiler (but parts ring false)
Review: It's hard to believe all the superlatives being heaped on this book. The Big Picture offers a picture of a yuppie-in-crisis that's been done better elsewhere, and also the hoary old plot about a man who adopts a new identity, goes into hiding, and then is threatened with exposure. Many of the featured players are a bit on the "stock" side, and the ending is absurdly pat.

If you were to evaluate this novel on its literary merits you would certainly have to turn thumbs-down. But really, that's the wrong way to see it. It's a page-turner, nothing more, and it is much more ambitious and successful than most of the books on the supermarket paperback rack.

Since this book is more than three years old as I write this, I suspect most of the people turning to this review section have already read the novel and are looking for confirmation of their own opinions, and aren't simply looking for guidance in their reading selections. So let me make an observation about one of the things that bothers me the most: The newspaper background in the final portion of the book just doesn't ring true.

The newspaper columnist is completely unrealistic, because no newspaper would tolerate his wild, drunken behavior. A small-town newspaper such as "The Montanan," evidently modeled after the "The Missoulan," wouldn't have the resources to be able to carry an out-of-control columnist on its staff. Let's face it: Small rural towns are more conservative than big cities, not more tolerant. Equally absurd is the character's assertion that he received a job offer from a button-down corporate outfit like the Seattle Times. This statement is presented without any balancing skepticism.

Without revealing too much about the plot, let's just say that the columnist's final threat doesn't make much sense in terms of his character, either. He sees himself as a crusader for truth and justice -- and he would be unlikely to take the action that the author inserts into his mouth. I'm not saying the columnist would blow the whistle on our hero, but there are more realistic ways the situation could have been resolved, and which might have changed the "pat" feel of the ending.

Also, a paper the size of the Missoulan would NEVER pay a couple grand for a newspaper photo. A couple hundred bucks, maybe. Let's face it: The rural northwest is not New York City.

Frankly, there are other elements that bother me, too -- like the late re-entry of the hero's wife into the novel. (I'm trying to be vague here.) It doesn't jibe with her previous actions, and the only apparent purpose that it serves is to launch the book into its concluding segment.

Let's hope that when this book hits the big screen, the screenwriters will find new, and more believable, ways to deal with these issues. You know, I find myself thinking that what Douglas Kennedy really needed for this book was a good editor.

Rating:
Summary: Turn off brain and enjoy the book
Review: We've been coughing pretty heavily around the book review department from the smoke and mirrors surrounding "The Big Picture" by Douglas Kennedy. Although we weren't favored with anything more than the book, the bigger media outlets have been flooded with goodies from Kennedy's publisher, Hyperion, including unbound manuscripts, "evidence bags" containing an "Advance Reader's Edition" and a panegyric signed by Hyperion chief Bob Miller, and brochures featuring the starred review from Publishers Weekly (their unsigned reviewer panted that "There is a lot of excitement in the air about Kennedy's novel and it is thoroughly justified"). Even 250 disposable cameras with "THE BIG PICTURE" printed on it were sent to magazine and newspaper editors and bookstore buyers.

All this is in service to a book with a lot of cash backing it. The manuscript by Kennedy, an American writer living in London these past two decades, fetched more than $1.1 million. The Disney-owned publisher announced a first printing of 300,000, and a $750,000 promotional campaign featuring newspaper ads, nationwide television spots, even a 30-second movie trailer.

You would have thought it was Jesus' memoirs Hyperion was selling, or at least "Gone With the Wind III." But "The Big Picture" weaves the thriller genre with the currently fashionable angst of those who can afford to drop $23.95 on a book everyone should be talking about: "Men Who Have Too Much And It's Still Not Enough."

Kennedy opens his opus by unveiling the inner life of one Ben Bradford, who lives with his wife and two children in their $450,000 colonial outside New York City. He's a Wall Street lawyer pulling down $315,000 a year dealing with wills and estates, but his real love is photography, a profession he wanted to enter but for his Type A father, who bullied him into entering law school instead. So instead of taking Pulitzer-prize winning photos in Bosnia, Ben indulges his hobby with the most expensive equipment his gold-plated lifestyle can afford.

But despite all this, he's not happy. He's in a job he hates, he's married to a woman who hates him, and he's stressed because his infant son has kept him from a night's sleep for the last 20 weeks.

This is the land settled by John Cheever and John Updike, but their protagonists never dealt with their defeats and disappointments the way Ben Bradford does. When he discovers that his wife is having an affair with the ne'er-do-well photographer down the street, Ben flips out and smashes the cur's head in with an especially fine New Zealand sauvignon blanc. Then, imaging a future featuring a divorce, no job and a long stretch in the pen, he cuts and runs. Lost in suburbia one moment, he plans his escape with a cunning and intelligence as if he's Tom Cruise of the Impossible Mission Force. He freezes his rival's body, takes a Black & Decker circular saw to him, smuggles the pieces on board a borrowed yacht, and blows it up at sea using a recipe from The Anarchist's Cookbook culled off the Internet. Pausing just long enough to borrow the man's identity, he lights out for the frontier, in this case, a small town in Montana that's been infected with what the locals call "Californication," where the new arrivals from the West Coast bring their money, their coffeehouses and art galleries, and their propensity for buying up all the land in sight. There, while living off the murdered man's trust fund, he builds on his borrowed identity and attempts to live his dream of being a photographer.

The opening chapters are especially tough sledding, since Kennedy piles on Ben every possible source of angst -- the bitching wife, the screaming kid at 2 a.m. with diarrhea leaking out his diapers, the memories of the youthful lover who achieved her dream of becoming a foreign correspondent, while he became just another lawyer who takes pictures for fun -- in an attempt to win our sympathy. But Ben is so wealthy, has so many possessions and is such a wimp that it's impossible to feel sympathy for him.

It also doesn't help that Ben is a self-obsessive jerk who abandons his children (but he feels sorry for them), twice murders (all right, the second time was really an accident, but it's so coincidental that he should get charged with it anyway), lies and steals. And we're supposed to admire him for it? I don't think so.

Kennedy wants us to think about how we live the life we have, rather than the life we want. The trouble is that this contradicts the story. Examining issues of escape and life are themes best suited for literary novels, not for books where the proper application of explosives helps a man follow his bliss. This contradiction turns "The Big Picture" into an intellectual masquerade, a jumped-up penny-dreadful wrapped in "profound issues" intended to make the reader feel like he's gaining a measure of insight, and not just being (heaven forbid!) entertained. If you can get past Ben Bradford's toxic whining, you'll find underneath a fast-moving, sometimes tense story, that does for wish-fulfilling males what "The Bridges of Madison County" did for romance-starved females. Give Virginia Woolf a room of her own; I want a circular saw.