Latest news with #JohnCheever
Toronto Star
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Toronto Star
Jon Hamm's new series, a Netflix sports show and an auction to aid Gaza: what the Star's Culture team recommends this week
TV: 'Your Friends & Neighbors' As it hurtles toward its May 30 season finale, this Apple TV Plus dramedy (new episodes on Fridays) has managed to surprise and compel week after week. A perfectly cast Jon Hamm stars as a newly divorced and fired hedge funder who keeps up the lifestyle to which he's become accustomed by stealing from the titular denizens of an unnamed leafy New York City suburb. Imagine John Cheever rebooting 'Breaking Bad' and you're nearly there. In the early 2000s, creator Jonathan Tropper (who also made the amazing action series 'Banshee') wrote a half-dozen novels that mined similar terrain. All are worth a look. —Doug Brod
New York Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
When Childhood Trauma Gives Way to Adult Ambivalence
What surprised me most about Honor Jones's debut novel, 'Sleep,' wasn't its smarts or its savvy, or even its astute renderings of motherhood, daughter-hood and the fraught enterprise of trying to regard each one through the lens of the other. No, what surprised me was that out of its careful, orderly prose — every word neatly placed as if on a well-set table — grew an exceptionally moving novel. Jones takes her cues from writers like John Cheever, Richard Yates and Virginia Woolf, all masters of the repressed and unsayable. She covers the same material — the resentments and traumas that smolder in families wrapped in a suburban idyll — and with similar delicacy and humor. But 'Sleep' also introduces a measure of optimism and generosity I found refreshing. 'Sleep' doesn't have the best start, but stick with it. The novel opens with the slightly humdrum threshold moments of 10-year-old Margaret's life as she begins to notice her body and debate who she is in the world, a girl or a woman. (At the shoe store: 'She definitely wasn't going to wear light-up Disney sneakers, but she wasn't going to wear purple velvet stilettos either.') It all feels like a familiar coming-of-age story until Margaret experiences something no child should, putting a more sinister spin on what it means to 'come of age' well before your time. From here the third-person perspective matures into Margaret's adulthood, and the novel matures into something more poignant, and interesting, as well. Margaret is now a 35-year-old magazine editor in New York City, and a newly divorced mother of two young daughters. It's the beginning of the #MeToo movement and most of the pieces she works on are first-person accounts of unwanted male attention. The pitches run the gamut, and come in with manipulative urgency — 'by speaking up we, by telling our stories we, never again will we,' Margaret thinks. 'How did one become part of it, speak on behalf of it — that confident plural voice?' Margaret is ambivalent about these stories and her own. What narrative should her childhood experience fall into? And how should she tell this story to herself as she contends with being both a parent to girls and a daughter to an aging mother, Elizabeth, on whose watch Margaret suffered? Jones is interested in the liminal space Margaret finds herself in, a space more psychological than generational: a state of consciousness that hovers between her past and present, resembling the uncertain and unstable experience of sleep. The novel excels when exploring this extrasensory place where we come to terms with our lives. If this sounds fey, part of the pleasure of 'Sleep' is that it's grounded in the prosaic; it traces a series of familial episodes that should feel banal but that are instead shot through with feeling. Take a scene where Margaret goes to pick up her daughters from her ex-husband Ezra's apartment. She's trying to corral the kids, but they are stalling. Five-year-old Jo keeps knocking things out of the medicine cabinet, including Ezra's new girlfriend's anti-wrinkle cream. Eight-year-old Helen is coloring a picture of her grandmother's house in New Jersey. Shortly they will all be visiting this house for a weekend to celebrate Jo's birthday. The stakes of the weekend are high: Elizabeth is overbearing, demanding, matriarch of the unsaid. The stakes of Margaret picking up her daughters are low. It's in the intersection of the two that Jones brandishes her artistry: It's chilling: the ex-husband gleefully watching his wife trying to shepherd the kids while he just sits there. Helen innocently drawing the house where Margaret suffered. The light that stops at the window. Jones is very good at capturing how trauma can taint even small moments like these, in subtle and insidious ways — which is perhaps why she's styled her prose so tightly. There are no crescendos here, no soaring, looping sentences full of ecstasy or dread. Instead she's hung her prose on a tension rod of unease, a proxy for how Margaret experiences her everyday life. It's tidy, and it works.
Wall Street Journal
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Your Friends and Neighbors' Review: Jon Hamm's Upscale Crime Spree
If John Cheever had conjured up Andrew Cooper of 'Your Friends and Neighbors,' the severed hedge-fund bro played by Jon Hamm would be dipping in and out of contiguous swimming pools. Instead, he's robbing houses. One man's existential crisis is another's crime spree, one supposes. In Coop's case, alienation proves to be very expensive. With no relation to the 1998 Neil LaBute film of the same name—except in its attempt at class assassination—this suburban-noir satire might be a victim of bad timing: Mr. Hamm, always watchable, makes Andrew more likable than he deserves to be in a nine-part series that casts the American Dream—if said dream involves having every material thing you could possibly want—as not just lacking but soul crushing. If you have a soul. During the Great Depression, movies cast the very rich as screwy. In Jonathan Tropper's very black comedy, they are far less amusing, as well as morally bankrupt. It feels a little easy.
Chicago Tribune
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
‘Your Friends & Neighbors' review: What if Don Draper had stayed in the suburbs after his divorce?
The pristine exteriors of affluent suburbs can belie an uglier truth behind closed doors. John Cheever built a career examining the dissatisfaction coursing beneath the surface in these manicured enclaves, and I'm sure Apple is hoping the Jon Hamm series 'You Friends & Neighbors' brings something similar to mind, even if it comes with considerably less insight. Hamm plays Andrew Cooper — Coop to everyone who knows him — a recently divorced New York hedge fund manager living in the 'burbs where he once shared a much larger house with his wife (Amanda Peet) and two teenage children. The fictional Westmont Village (somewhere in Connecticut maybe?) is filled with 'seven and eight-figure homes, rolling lawns and exclusive clubs,' but the marriages and personal finances of its residents are riddled with cracks, even if everyone pretends otherwise. When Coop is fired and unable to get another job, the loss of his steady, ostentatious income functions as a wake-up call, revealing the lies undergirding this lifestyle. To maintain the illusion that he's still a master of the universe like his friends and neighbors, he starts burgling their homes. A roll of cash to start. Then designer watches, and so on. But he needs someone to move these hot items and a sketchy pawn shop will have to do. Problem is, he didn't think to also steal the papers authenticating those watches, so he gets a lowball offer. When he counters, the unflappable pawn shop owner (Randy Danson) sizes him up: 'We don't get men like you in here very often,' she says evenly. 'You're, what, a trader? A stockbroker? Whatever. The point is you're a man who buys and sells things he never touches.' But now he's trying to offload something tangible and his usual bluster and swagger are useless. 'You don't understand this market, but you still think you can negotiate it. That's not savvy,' she tells him, 'that's stupidity.' It's a great monologue — both as written and Danson's delivery, which is perfectly judged. Soon enough, Coop is in over his head. That's one narrative thread. The suburban ennui is the other. The women are thin, beautifully preserved and, despite their material abundance, secretly miserable. So are the men. 'Out here, scotch was like a religion,' Coop muses to himself, as he looks around at his male companions. 'These houses, these wives, these jobs, this would be the sum total of their lives. Their futures were already written. And so the quest to stave off the emptiness began. Scotch. Cigars. Smoked meats. Custom golf clubs. High-end escorts. Entire industries built to cash in on the quiet desperation of rich middle-aged men.' They have so much and yet so little. If only that duality were interesting. It's a world where consequences don't really exist if you have enough money. Parents are permissive and checked out, but obsessed about their kids' futures. They're good people underneath it all, which is facile and my main beef with the series. What these people are is human — neither especially good nor sympathetic — but human nevertheless. Coop's marriage ended after he caught his wife cheating with a retired NBA champ (Mark Tallman) who was part of their social circle, and it wasn't just a one-off; she's now dating the guy, and quite happily by all outward appearances. At least that's what Coop sourly assumes. As a show, 'Your Friends & Neighbors' suggests the rich are disconnected from everything because that's just what happens when you reach this tax bracket, as if everyone were a passive participant in their lives rather than people making conscious choices. Peet is playing a likable woman who was neglected in her marriage and sought attention elsewhere. And yet she's still unmoored; this new chapter isn't all it's cracked up to be. But she isn't thinking about how all this massive wealth has left her feeling so empty, and is turning her children into deadeye, alienated creatures. With his newfound cynicism, Coop is meant to be the realist of the bunch. But the pawn shop owner nailed who he is from the start, because his thefty activities aren't any different — not spiritually, anyway — from his legitimate ventures at the hedge fund, where the goal is maximizing wealth for the already wealthy, no matter who suffers. Coop has just picked more deserving targets this time. It's too bad the series (which has already been renewed for another season) isn't interested in sorting through those parallels more deeply. But the show's creator, Jonathan Tropper, has done something interesting with his star. There's a frisson of recognition that happens when you put Hamm in a role like this. Coop is a latter day Don Draper, but instead of fleeing the suburbs after his divorce, he stayed put and started to burgle his neighbors. With the lie of the suburban idyll exposed, aren't guys like this — who drive Maseratis and think the world belongs to them — moving into overpriced bachelor pads in the city for a midlife crisis and some messy sowing of oats? I know someone who grew up in a suburb like this so I asked, and the answer surprised me: Actually, these men are likely to remain, even if they don't have joint custody of the kids. The suburbs are what they know. It's where they're comfortable. To leave means starting over in ways far more disruptive than sticking around and — chances are — marrying a fellow wealthy suburbanite. 'Your Friends & Neighbors' — 2.5 stars (out of 4)
