Hautman goes head-to-head against Carl Hiassen’s Lucky You with his own hilarious take on the larcenous lemmings that swarm around a lottery winner. Why shouldn’t sweet, tough, innocent Barbaraannette Quinn, the second-grade teacher who for years has been playing permutations of her relatives’ birthdays in Powerball, rake in an $8.9 million windfall? And why shouldn’t she impulsively decide, confronted by TV cameras outside the lottery office, to offer a million-dollar reward for the return of her husband Bobby? After all, Bobby’s not exactly estranged, he’s just been AWOL for six years. And now, living as boot salesman Bobby Steele with voluptuous, good-natured Phlox Anderson in Tucson, he gets wind of his wife’s offer within seconds and decides to turn himself in for the reward, figuring he’ll put off worrying about what he’s going to do about the women in his life till after he’s got the greenbacks in his hand. But more pressing complications ensue. Reaching his hometown of Cold Rock, Minnesota, Bobby’s immediately spotted by ethereally beautiful, deeply sociopathic con man Jayjay Morrow, who’s happy to interrupt his routine of writing lying, cadging letters to celebrities and sponging off his latest admirer, the besotted Professor AndrÇ Gideon, to kidnap Bobby and hold him for ransom. Feisty Barbaraannette, the daughter of Hautman semi-regular Sam O’Gara (The Mortal Nuts, 1996, etc.), doesn’t take this development lying down. And neither does Phlox, or Barbaraannette-smitten bank officer Art Dobbleman, or those Henry High ex-football players Hugh Hulke and Rodney Gent. You can try to imagine what sorts of things happen next, though you’ll be two steps behind Hautman. If Hautman’s line-by-line writing is less joyously baroque than Hiassen’s—and it’s an awfully close race—his powers of invention and dexterity are even greater as he provides delightfully unexpected roles for Jayjay, Phlox, Gideon, and Barbaraannette’s senile mother Hilde Grabo.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-83243-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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