A vivid, intimate collection of memories, ponderings, and portraits.
Darlington (The New Cocktail Hour, 2016, etc.) presents a collection of slice-of-life moments on a Chinatown bus.
This series of untitled, undated journallike prose poems was written, in part, on the titular “China Bus,” which travels between the Chinatowns of Philadelphia and New York City. Darlington evokes a milieu where riders smoke cigarettes, sob after too much alcohol, and debate the number of sexes beyond male and female. On the bus, the seats are constantly busted—and you’d best not touch underneath. “The China bus goes every hour between every city on the planet, and no one on it is quite alright,” Darlington writes. As one’s mind tends to do during commutes, the author’s train of thought wanders. He recounts running out of gas during a trip to the Yucatan, how “in the Himalayas…drivers pray to little plastic gods taped to their dashboards,” and a breakup in a fancy Chicago hotel room. Darlington’s missives reference sources as diverse as the tribes of the Great Plains to Sigmund Freud to the musical group The Handsome Family. His observations are quotidian but incisive; he wonders where a child found an ice cream cone so early in the morning, compares the fashion scenes in New York and Philadelphia, and studies sex workers like a sociologist: “We are all looking for a better situation than the one we find ourselves in. The hookers are better off than me financially, and they certainly have more clothes,” he writes. There’s a subtle yet authentic undercurrent of sadness to the daily weirdness that he experiences on his commute: “I wonder if any of the other travelers on the bus are like me. I have already died, and am a ghost traveling to New York to get a decent epitaph.” These stark passages serve as glimpses into others’ lives and feel complete even when as brief as a paragraph.
A vivid, intimate collection of memories, ponderings, and portraits.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-978139-61-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
