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BATMAN

THE ULTIMATE EVIL

If you were floored by Robin Williams's genie in Aladdin, wait till you sink your fangs into the latest, and unlikeliest, pop-cultural marriage: child-abuse specialist Vachss (Footsteps of the Hawk, p. 982, etc.) meets the Caped Crusader. And what a crusade the novelist has for the superhero. A chance meeting with Gotham caseworker Debra Kane opens his alter ego Bruce Wayne's eyes to the myriad ways child abuse, not poverty or social injustice, breeds crime. Faithful butler Alfred, judging the time to be right, passes on documents left behind by Batman's mother that show that she was no mere housewife, but a sociologist investigating the systematic exploitation of children (and assassinated along with her husband because of her discoveries). These revelations are enough to send the Dark Knight into a righteous fury against casual muggers and rapists, gangsters and crooked cops, and finally the ringleaders in the procurement racket. First, witnesses to his summary handling of criminals note a new anger emerging; then, Batman resolves to go to the heart of this hydra-headed scourge by Batjetting to the mythical Asian land of Udon Khai and fomenting a revolution against the child-buyers. On the one hand, Batman's vigilantism makes him a natural hero for Vachss, whose customary persona Burke is practically a Batguy himself. On the other hand, Batman's adventures hereas he disposes of each lower-level pimp, then moves up to the next leveldon't have any more substantive content than a ``Destroy All Exploiters'' video game would; impatient readers who skip the entire novel and go directly to journalist David Hechler's disturbing appended essay, ``Child Sex Tourism,'' won't have missed a thing. More successful as a media event, then, than as a work of narrative art, however demotic. But Vachss himself would probably agree that staging events like this one to grab headlines is precisely his point.

Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1995

ISBN: 0-446-51912-X

Page Count: 192

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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