Beam (Fellow Travelers, 1987) gets some rather obvious satirical mileage—but not many laughs—out of his second novel, this one about selling the American Way in a dusty corner of conquered Russia. In 1999, a post-Gorbachev Soviet Union fires the first shot of WW III, over in 20 minutes in a sort of real-life computer game with no casualties. The victorious US, headed by President Arnold Schwarzenegger, picks out the lackluster area of Uglich on the Volga for a model experiment in democracy. Put in charge is Martin Teasdale, undercover CIA agent who knows Russia, has a feeling for it, and takes up his task with good will. But he is stymied by the Russianness of the Russians, the Americanness of the Americans, and a host of scheming mischief-makers. His chief ally is the laid-back Melor (acronym of Marx, Engels, Lenin, October Revolution), his KGB counterpart. Among Teasdale's opponents are Dyermoyed, ousted party boss who runs against him in an election; Moronin, a young man hipped on revolutionary texts who takes to the hills with a ragtag army; and T. Makkro Fixx, American entrepreneur intent on using the populace for unethical experiments. Teasdale's main personal enemy appears to be his wife—a lazy, neofeminist virago who won't give him the time of day, let alone her body. The unlikely result of this soured union are two lively young daughters who take to Russia with zest. Besides having fun with the oil-and-water culture clash, Beam plays with the mergers he envisions down the road, creating such entities as the Lord and Ann Taylor store, Sonysonic telephone, BMVW car, and USA-Times newspaper. A mildly entertaining muddle that often relies too much on exaggeration, Mad magazine-fashion, to score its points about Russians and Americans.
Pub Date: July 13, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-05812-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1991
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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