Lots of fun.
A dizzyingly clever novel from Langer (My Father’s Bonus March, 2009, etc.) that explores the thin line between fact and fiction, and between memoir and novel.
Narrator Ian Minot, a frustrated writer, is angry that a hack named Blade Markham is being celebrated for a memoir about growing up on the mean streets of New York City, a memoir Ian is convinced Markham made up, his street cred being limited to copping an attitude and inserting “yo” at the end of every sentence. Soon Ian links up with Jed Roth, a fellow writer who’s penned The Thief of Manhattan, a novel about stealing a valuable copy of The Tale of Genji, burning down the library that housed it and murdering a couple of book fanatics. Jed persuades Ian to rewrite the novel, alter a few incidents and submit it to publisher Geoff Olden as a memoir. The plan is to have it become a bestseller and then publicly humiliate Olden (who’d published Markham’s book) when it’s revealed to be a fake. Ian’s life is complicated by his attachment to his girlfriend, Anya Petrescu, whose memoir about growing up in Romania, We Never Talked About Ceausescu, is creating buzz. Eventually Anya drops Ian and hooks up with Markham. Meanwhile, Ian scores a deal with Olden, famous for reading only the first and last pages of a manuscript. Ian’s “memoir” is published under the title The Thieves of Manhattan...but it turns out that Roth’s original manuscript is in fact based more on truth than on fiction and that Roth may have been manipulating Ian the entire time.
Lots of fun.Pub Date: July 13, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6891-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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