All over the place, but that’s the point.
The former president of a Montana separatist group, a couple of street crazies, a crushed-out computer programmer, the quantum physicist of the title and more appear in Felber’s raucous, willfully absurd debut.
There’s eventually a moment when most of these folks come together. But it’s not exactly a climax, and Felber’s pretty much chucked the plot machine—instead, he’s crafted an assortment of vignettes designed to expose the beautiful randomness of existence. In Cambridge, Mass., a folkie named Johnny inspires an enormous cult following based on a single performance, but now he’s supposedly dead; across town, Dr. Erwin Schrödinger (who, yes, should also be dead) begins selling palm-sized molecules with the help of a young woman he met at a yogurt shop; meanwhile, a rat named Lester lusts after a piece of meat he’s spotted, but he’s a little panicky because there are people hovering nearby and he’s recently stepped in a foul-smelling egg yolk. Why is this novel not an unhinged, inchoate mess? For one thing, Felber keeps a genial, clear-headed tone throughout, and he’ll spike the story with interesting shifts in writing styles—at one point, the novel becomes the script for a World War II-era newsreel; at another, short-circuits into binary code; and at yet another, two old pals fall into Shakespearean speech, complete with monologues in iambic pentameter. Mainly, though, it gets its power from the details each individual story accrues—that rat and Dr. Schrödinger never meet, but half the fun is realizing that they’re both floating around Cambridge together. Felber has embraced postmodern fiction’s favorite themes—narratives can’t be trusted, reality is subjective, humans are subject to larger forces—and turned it into a work of broad comedy instead of a fit of fatalistic handwringing.
All over the place, but that’s the point.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2006
ISBN: 0-8129-7442-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
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
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
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