To provide for his family in an America run by libertarianism, a man becomes a living organ farm for a large medical corporation.
In the not-too-distant future, the charismatic Enrico Prima and the Freedom First party have transformed America into a libertarian country where big corporations rule. In order to pay his son’s growing health care expenses in this uncaring society, Jonathan Newman is forced to take a lucrative but horrific job with the medical conglomerate QualLab. As their new “employee,” Jonathan is strapped to a table that will mine and sell his body for fluids and tissues over the next two years, all the while isolating him from his family. Rosell’s debut tosses the reader headfirst into the antiseptic world of Jonathan’s QualLab cell, with effective imagery recalling works like Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. Obviously political, the novel is respectably transparent with its leanings (take its slogan “and life is no tea party”), and even as a partisan cautionary tale the plot is never sacrificed for its message. The novel’s greatest strength is its world-building, hypothesizing the horrors of an unregulated free market and the nuance and gaudiness of such a system. In the spirit of good future histories, the book employs excellent foreshadowing, revealing the cracks in its world gradually, while organically introducing the reader not just to this new America, but also showing the ways in which the country was changed so dramatically. It falls short in places—the novel’s use of footnotes feels uninspired, as much of their information could have been fed naturally into the narrative and better served the story overall. Also the circumstances that allowed Enrico Prima to lead America into a libertarian dystopia are a little too vague, even with liberal suspension of disbelief. There are a few smaller problems—cliché villains and trite sexual situations, but this feels like nitpicking since Rosell’s novel is a consistently fun read with a strong message at its core. Occasionally shallow, but absolutely entertaining.
Pub Date: July 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-1461157458
Page Count: 325
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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