A near-future novel that depicts with savage glee the economic-driven Armageddon awaiting us: a choreographed, televised race war brought to you by your local sponsors. The author of two baseball-oriented novels (A Stone of the Heart, 1990; Season's End, 1992), Grimes here makes a quantum leap into DeLillo land, taking the usual Blade Runner vision of our world in a few years' timeincome disparity a gulf, the streets a battlefieldand casting it in the poetry of direct marketing. For most white people in their armored sedans and feudal communities, overspending is the only heroism; for the black and brown ghetto, life revolves around crack and virtual-reality arcades. But then black crackhead Do-Ray, heeding the mysterious rapper Coda, blows away two cops, bringing on rioting and murders that are carried live on XXN-TV. Looking for Do-Ray are Nick, a disinherited louse of a public defender; Julia, a prosecutor with a skinhead 14-year- old son on the lam; and McKuen, a black Vietnam vet detective. As the characters converge, Do-Ray understands that he's been manipulated into taking the fall as the nonexistent Codaa ratings- boosting creation of XXN and its Bill Gateslike, seemingly omniscient chiefand reaches for a vision of love and redemption. Julia and McKuen never find their quarry, but they do find each other. And Nick, pathetic to the end, dies reaching for XXN's brass ring. Grimes hews to his vision and keeps the energy up almost to the last, beginning with opening setpieces that are brilliant, language-fueled riffs, bleakly funny and uncomfortably accurate (``Can't produce jobs, we'll mass-produce criminals,'' says Nick, upon hearing that the police are using the riots as an excuse for mass arrests). The characterizations are a bit thin, but then, this is television. Pungent with the lunatic language of consumer-driven tabloid America, this horrifying prophecy of a book, coming on the heels of the Oklahoma City bombing, seems closer to social commentary than satire.
Pub Date: Aug. 14, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03789-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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