A novel with a number of interesting parts that don’t quite come together.
In her debut novel, Szilágyi tells a story about loss, the human cost of governmental repression, and the painful possibilities of growing up, all with overtones of fantastical detail.
Pluta is 14 years old and on her own in Brooklyn in 1980 after running away from boarding school. She is an odd, sullenly determined girl who seems to at first fall into a lucky fantasy of New York runaway life. She immediately meets an eccentric young man who takes her out to dinner, accompanies her to a tattoo parlor so she can get wings tattooed on her back, and welcomes her into his shabby Gowanus apartment without any malicious intentions. Unfortunately, Pluta’s new independence quickly runs into the darker side of city life, and she plunges into a predictable decline, sleeping in parks and turning to prostitution to survive. This bleak coming-of-age story alternates with glimpses of Pluta’s life just two years earlier, when she lived in Buenos Aires with her mother and beloved, professorial father. When Pluta’s father is disappeared during Argentina’s Dirty War, her mother, battered by grief and fear, decides to flee to America and install Pluta in a fancy boarding school. These South American chapters have a vivid emotional earnestness that fits awkwardly with Pluta’s struggles in New York, which suffer from a chilly numbness. When terrible or difficult things happen to Pluta, Szilágyi explains how she feels but does not give the reader the opportunity to feel it. Without the driving force of clear emotions and motivations, Pluta’s choices seem slightly baffling, and the various threads of story drift into disparate parts. The novel’s fantastical elements feel like picturesque trappings, never quite woven into the plot or the emotional heft of the story in a way that makes sense.
A novel with a number of interesting parts that don’t quite come together.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-941360-11-8
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Lanternfish Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
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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