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JOHNNY CRITELLI and THE KNIFEMEN

A welcome advance over his messy and confessional Edge of Night (1994), these two novellas by the Duke literary theorist still bear the signs of someone who's spent much of his career thinking about fiction, not creating it. The first, self-reflexive story interweaves elements of the author's childhood with a mythic figure from the Utica, New York, of his youth. Johnny Critelli, orphaned when his mother was assaulted by a union-busting factory thug, grew up to become a union organizer. Nurtured on Shakespeare and anarchist politics, the outsized Critelli enters legend with a barroom stunt that we eventually learn was staged, an effort by Critelli to create his own myth. Meanwhile, the Lentricchia clan of hard-working Italian immigrants eventually produce Frank Junior, the author; among his recollections is the golden memory of a one-hitter he pitched in 1952. Which is better than his obsessional concerns as an adult: Sex and physical ailments. Lentricchia allows both his mother and his current girlfriend to talk, the first worried about what ``Mr. Exaggeration'' will have her say, the second a tough-minded Irishwoman who mocks Frank's inability to confront the familiar dead. Despite patches of postmod babble, this unconventional story/faux memoir builds into a fine poetic narrative. The second novella is more straightforward, but also aggressively disagreeable. At its center is the thrice-divorced ob-gyn, Dr. Richard Assisi, a brooding obsessive. An admitted ``cultured whiner,'' Assisi has never overcome his mother's early death, for which he blames his father. He falls under the spell of the sophisticated, creepy Victor Grazeidei, the owner of a Utica meatpacking plant, who introduces Richard to the slaughterhouse and his after-hours work as an abortionist, both of which are described in gruesome, poetic detail. Even at his most meta-level, Lentricchia aspires to Joycean riffs (with Utica his Dublin) on memory, desire, and the struggles of fathers and sons. Sometimes he succeeds.

Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-684-81408-0

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1996

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

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

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