A quasi-humorous novel and field guide for broken-hearted adolescents.
In Aloi’s debut novel, a young man struggles to decide whether to stay with his girlfriend or try to sleep with many other girls.
Vincent Wing—call him “Wing,” everybody else does—is a typical misogynistic teen, obsessed with sex but terrified of commitment with his girlfriend Clara. The problem is that he’s also (maybe) in love with the enchanting Maggie. She has certain physical features that draw our randy hero, although, to be fair, she’s hardly the only girl Wing’s age whose prominent features elicit his full-tilt, testosterone-fueled lust spiral. Such juvenile reduction of women and girls to sex objects is a major bonding point for Wing and his friends, who have names such as Hot Dog, Figs, Chink, the Shit, Monkey, the Bull and Nails. In fact, Aloi devotes much of the novel to describing their dehumanizing dialogue in what can best be described as a boys-will-be-boys tone, which does little to generate compassion for the narrator or much interest in his plight. The plot, such as it is, revolves around a much-anticipated senior trip to Porto Seguro, Brazil. While there, Wing has the opportunity to seduce copious women, but, of course, his heart belongs to Clara. Will they or won’t they get back together? The minor dramas of adolescent sexual politics may make for an intriguing lived experience, but it takes a skilled hand, often lacking here, to pull it off on the page. The real drama is whether or not the painfully self-aware Wing will ever realize that sexist vernacular isn’t the magic key to a woman’s heart (or body). Comedy can do much to illuminate the human condition, but Wing’s and his friends’ jokes never move beyond slut-shaming and gay-baiting to get at deeper truth, which is unfortunate. Aloi’s prose has the potential to be quite strong, and at its best, it comes through crisply: “She went back clumsily to talking to the rugger, though he looked like he might as well have been a pair of headphones.” In the final estimation, however, this story of Wing and his friends seems as anachronistic as its pop-culture references.
A quasi-humorous novel and field guide for broken-hearted adolescents.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1492893790
Page Count: 264
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2014
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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