This psychological tale offers uncomfortable episodes of violence and sexuality.
In this debut fantasy thriller, four distinct personalities converge to battle a man’s inner demon.
Nick Glaude, a software engineer, is visiting his hometown in Illinois. He wanders past an old schoolyard, reveling in memories, when he encounters a former classmate whom he calls Katherine. She agrees to dinner and then invites him to spend the night at her apartment. Inside, “the Beast that ruled me didn’t even give her time to make up a bed on the couch,” and Nick has sex with the drunk woman. During the night, he slips outside into an alley and acknowledges that he’s just an Ordinary Man. He soon realizes that he shares his body with three other minds from parallel worlds: the Gladiator, the Assassin, and the Pervert. Each of these men has led a life of transgression. They take turns sharing their pasts with Nick, including murder, brutality, and the seduction of teen girls. In the morning, he returns to Katherine’s apartment and finds her with George, her physically abusive ex-boyfriend. The Gladiator takes over Nick’s body, pummels George, and later turns himself over to the cops. At the police station, Nick meets someone whom the Pervert recognizes, Detective Eve Aidan. Is she the key to freeing Nick from the Beast’s influence? In this fractious thriller, Bobrov effectively conjures the viewpoints of Nick’s personalities, offering detailed vignettes with psychological insights. During one of the Assassin’s flashbacks, readers learn that before killing the chosen victim, “a special team followed the person for several weeks and determined the best method of removal.” Scenes centered on the Pervert, and even the opening starring the Ordinary Man, will likely make some readers uneasy (he saw a “huddle of naked and obedient girls ready to serve me and surrender themselves”). Other lines may stop audiences cold, as when the foursome argues mentally over “what was so bad about the Pervert? Who are we to judge Evil?” While valid questions of morality are addressed here, extensive fight scenes and a lingering focus on sexual sins make this a tough read.
This psychological tale offers uncomfortable episodes of violence and sexuality.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5136-1762-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: Movement Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2017
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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