Both creepy and dull.
One man’s quest to avenge a relative’s murder becomes an obsession in this lame debut novel.
Narrator Owen Patterson, a software-manual writer in Los Angeles, meets Patricia Stocking on the Lake Tahoe ski slopes; after a whirlwind romance, they marry. But their honeymoon is interrupted by a tragedy. Patty’s younger brother Calvin Junior (CJ) has been murdered. Her parents (aggressively masculine Calvin Senior, daffy Minerva) are devastated; Patty wears black year-round and spends her time watching old videos of CJ. The killer, Henry Joseph Raven, though not admitting guilt, gets a sentence of 20 years. Owen decides to ease his wife’s misery by punishing Raven himself. He plans to entrap Raven emotionally through letters supposedly written by a lonely, available female; once Raven is hooked, the woman will end the relationship, Raven will be crushed and Patty will find closure; until then, Owen will keep his “mission” secret. It’s as far-fetched as it sounds. For starters, Owen is a wimp, incapable of a bold ruse; it’s Patty who calls the shots. Secondly, he has reason to believe Raven already has a woman of his own. Nonetheless, he goes ahead, inventing a woman, Lily, who with the help of computer-generated photos arouses Raven’s interest. He even dons Patty’s panties to feel like a woman, but a would-be humorous scene, when he’s caught wearing the panties in a restroom, falls flat. Their correspondence and its ramifications take up much of the novel. We also learn more about the crime (a botched carjacking) and CJ (a bratty college kid, quite unsympathetic). As Patty heals, discarding black and boxing the videos, Owen deteriorates, getting a guilty thrill out of writing to a killer, and even identifying with Raven in a sexual fantasy he has created. When Patty discovers the letters, she leaves, and Owen becomes further isolated from reality. The novel ends with a series of improbable surprises that land Owen in the slammer.
Both creepy and dull.Pub Date: May 22, 2007
ISBN: 1-59051-263-4
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Handsel/Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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