Review by Booklist Review
A trenchant tale of obsession, decadence, and delusion by a New York painter and art journalist who really knows his stuff. His postmodernist Frankenstein is set in the jaded 1990s art world where style and power have long eradicated meaningful aesthetics and supermodels are everyone's favorite celebrities. Artist, perfectionist, and narcissist Jamie Angelo is a star in this muted constellation, a self-professed "New Master" whose best medium is flesh and blood. Compulsive about physical perfection, Angelo's pursuit of flawless beauty leads him to a high-risk and lucrative secret career as an unlicensed cosmetic surgeon who does more than nip and tuck. Jamie applies artificial skin to his ambitious victims' faces, painstakingly dyeing and texturing the surface to attain impossible levels of smoothness and allure. His art turns women into breathing mannequins, taking the fashion imperative to new levels of madness. D'Amato entrances us with technical detail, the rituals of glamour, and psychological tension as Jamie creates the ultimate face on his lover from Bombay, performance artist Jaishree. Shrewdly bewitching, gratifyingly ironic and inevitable, this will engage all kinds of readers. ~--Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Pygmalion, Dorian Gray, and Frankenstein find a snappy new milieu in this ambitious first novel, which explores art, celebrity, and the cult of physical beauty in present-day New York's downtown scene. Rising art-world star Jamie Angelo works clandestinely in a very controversial medium-human flesh. With some scientist buddies from his days at Yale, Jamie has developed a radical form of cosmetic surgery. Harnessing his aesthetic sensibility and his mastery of painting technique, he creates new faces for celebrities and the very wealthy, stripping away unsightly tissue and replacing it with an artificial skin first used on burn victims. Initially, this process is merely restorative, but as his skill and ambition increase, Jamie becomes obsessed with creating the ultimate beauty. His girlfriend, Jaishree, a frustrated performance artist, becomes the clay for his masterpiece. D'Amato writes with aplomb, developing a first-person narrative-in Jamie's increasingly neurotic voice-that maintains credibility throughout. There are some uneasy shifts between lofty theoretical discussion and the argot of downtown-phrases like "megally beat"-and the theorizing itself sometimes waxes sophomoric. The frequent invocation of pop-culture icons and actual figures from the art world also becomes a bit tiresome and blunts the novel's satirical edge. Still, this literate, postmodern grab bag of weird insights and compelling themes marks an auspicious debut. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Obsessed with beauty, Jamie D'Angelo is an emerging New York artist whose true metier--reconstructing the human face--must be practiced secretly, since his advanced procedure has not been medically approved. With his expensive lifestyle supported by wealthy clients, Jamie longs to create a face of ultimate beauty. But when he finally fulfills his wish, the experiment backfires with hideous consequences. First novelist D'Amato, an artist himself, deftly captures society's preoccupation with youth and beauty. ``Facial beauty is kind of a controlling metaphor for everything our society wants,'' declares Jamie, and in this deranged, arrogant character, the author stretches the compulsion to its darkest extreme. Trendiness aside, Beauty is a fascinating and memorable parable of artistic creation. Definitely recommended.-- Sister M. Anna Falbo CSSF, Villa Maria Coll. Lib., Buffalo, N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Dr. Frankenstein goes Downtown in D'Amato's ultrachic, ultramodern, rather grotesque first novel. Like the author (son of novelist Barbara D'Amato), narrator Jamie Angelo is a Yale graduate and Manhattan artist; but Jamie's greatest creations are known only to a few. For Jamie's sideline, which has bought him his huge loft and the means to hobnob with hipdom's cognoscenti, is the unlawful creation of beautiful people by means of cosmetic surgery using a secret new plastic and computer-aided modeling. Much of the novel's opening is devoted to a clinical description of Jamie's work on actress and fellow Yalie Penny Penn (read: Jodie Foster). But as rewarding as the Penny project is, Jamie desires the ultimate challenge--to create the ideally beautiful woman. He finds his subject in a performance artist, transforming her into ``Minaz,'' an uncannily exquisite model/actress. Predictably, though, Jamie's work bites back-- through sabotage by a greedy partner--and Minaz's face mutates into a cancerous moonscape, forcing Jamie to flee for his life and into a thuddingly ironic resolution. This arch if structurally predictable variation on Mary Shelley's tale forms only the bones of D'Amato's story; its flesh, as patchworked and morally ambiguous as Shelley's beast, consists of Jamie's clever, smug, name-dropping riffs on blood rituals, youth, beauty, decay, zits and how to pop them, art, wealth, poverty (``God, I hate the underclass. I'm sorry to say it, but it's true. They're just so lumpy and bad-looking''), and so on--adding up, no doubt, to a Message about the artificial cast of modern life. Ambitious and crackling with raw intellectual energy, but, like its inspiration, also ungainly, ugly, and perhaps even a little monstrous.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
