A storyteller mastering his craft.
Eight tales of youthful heartache and road-trip escapades from the Michigan rapper, filmmaker and creator of Found (www.foundmagazine.com).
The young male narrators in this spare, somber debut collection are restless, unsettled and often from sticky home situations. The teenager who narrates “Maggie Fever” is sent to live with his grandfather in Albuquerque, “a weird and scary dude” who makes his living collecting rented carts from the airport and who cherishes his sick cat, Gilbert. When Gilbert requires an expensive operation, Grandpa suggests a scheme of stealing people’s luggage and the boy finds some friendly solace reading the diary of the owner (Maggie) of the backpack he swipes. The title story concerns a couple of road-trippers speeding across Kansas. They come upon a boy named Kyle, who has taught himself to surf, implausibly, in the cornfields. Provoking a shootout with the town cop on their way to take Kyle to the hospital to set his broken arm, the narrator and his on-again-off-again girlfriend learn the sad, hopeless story of Kyle’s sick sister, and the narrator seizes the “bleak revelation—Kyle would never get to the ocean.” Indeed, these characters are stuck for good where they are, like the members of the road gang, prisoners of Galloway Lake Detention Center, who make the lone, weak black man, Maurice, the butt of their vicious jokes. When Maurice’s own sorrow finally surfaces, the men explode in their anger and desperation and beat him horribly: “ . . . the madness of it brought great wild smiles to our faces.” The young narrator of “Elena,” looking for work, seeks “a good situation” across the border in Juarez helping coyotes enlist truck drivers to carry stowaways. The work turns ugly (how can he imagine otherwise?), and even the one redemptive note, his love for the teenage prostitute Elena, can’t alter the persistent corrosion of poverty and ignorance. Other stories are occasionally sophomoric in their handling, but, overall, Rothbart writes with control, precision and compassion.
A storyteller mastering his craft.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6305-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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