Here you have three fascinating stories bound together. You have the novelised, or very nearly televisualised, life of Sigmund Freud. You have a Broadway musical about the visit of Leon Trotsky to New York in 1917. And, some way into the future, you have the crushing of the planet Earth by a heavyweight intruder from a distant galaxy. . . . These three stories are all the same story: they are all about the end of history as man has known it." So says Burgess in his cheery blurb here. But, while those three separate novelettes are indeed chopped up and offered in alternating chunks throughout, they don't coalesce thematically (even if Burgess sees Freud, socialism, and outer-space as the century's Big Three items); nor does the revolving focus really achieve what Burgess calls a "new way of reading"—changing channels, as on TV. And readers will probably wind up sampling this Burgess bagatelle (if at all) by choosing one of the storylines and following it through, skipping over the other two. The Freud bio is best; it's partly a parody of the Irving Stone/TV-movie approach to pop-biography, beginning with the dying Freud leaving Vienna and then moving into the usual flashbacks (" 'I'm sick of you and your dreams,' Martha said, pouring coffee. 'If it's not one thing it's another. First it's Oedipus. Now it's dreams' "); but it's impressive, too, as it eruditely packs virtually every highlight of stormy psychoanalytic history into tiny vignettes (Adler, Jung, Ferenczi, Anna); and it manages to convey a hint of Freud-as-genuine-tragic-hero—while also leaping into the fanciful (Freud and Jung playing free-association games, Freud conversing with his cancer). The science-fiction novella is so-so: world's-end is nigh as a planet called Lynx is on collision course with future Earth; an elite handful is selected for spaceship survival, including ouranologist Vanessa Frame but not including her sci-fi-writer husband Valentine; the focus shifts back and forth between the doomed Earthlings and: the pre-flight spaceship (where tyranny and mutiny simmer); so there's an uprising at the end, with some of the good guys taking over the ship. And the Trotsky musical? Well, it's pretty dull, silly stuff—Trotsky falling in love, being tempted by capitalism—especially since the heavily-rhymed song lyrics are far too ambitious to be read as parody. A minor-Burgess potpourri, then—with occasional fun, lots of talent on indiscriminate display. . . and, despite the author's assurances ("This book is very deep"), considerably less than meets the eye.
Pub Date: March 21, 1983
ISBN: 0070089655
Page Count: 408
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1983
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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