An entertaining intellect wrapped in ill-fitting clothes.
Ulinich (Petropolis, 2007) follows her debut with a graphic novel chronicling a young immigrant writer’s adventures through family, friendship and sex.
It’s fitting that Ulinich’s protagonist shares a first name with the creator of Girls. Besides a self-aware comparison to Lena Dunham’s film Tiny Furniture within the text, the book also shares terrain with the Dunham verse, being the story of a creative young woman’s emotional fallout from sexual exploits in neobohemia. Having emigrated from Russia with her family as a teenager, married young in Arizona (to gain a green card) and lost her virginity behind an arcade game, then settled in Park Slope, Brooklyn, as a 20-something, twice-married mother of two, our narrator is unable to grasp the touchstones of any single culture. She lays herself bare as she works through a reconnection with the possible soul mate she left behind in St. Petersburg (she sleeps with him during a cultural ambassadorship to the motherland as a successful novelist), a safari through the wilds of online dating (beware the vampire of Bensonhurst), and an explosive affair with a sensitive, damaged, miserly trust-fund artist known simply as the Orphan. While Lena's confessions occasionally clog this supposedly graphic novel with pages of nearly solid text, in other spots, it’s engagingly expressed as short, comic strip–like vignettes that juxtapose a simplistic, juvenile visual style against mature subject matter, bringing to mind the work of David Heatley. Ulinich tells the bulk of the tale in black-and-white chiaroscuro drawings that generally land somewhere between Michael Kupperman and an art school sketchbook. The inconsistency in the illustrations is maddening, with full-page, richly detailed close-ups of characters radiating pathos, while other panels are flat, stiff, workmanlike affairs that simply carry along the accompanying humorous observations. Yet for all the extended introspection, an ultimate reveal about the Orphan is elided, the omission waved off in the interest of a vague personal truth.
An entertaining intellect wrapped in ill-fitting clothes.Pub Date: July 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-14-312524-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
Farewell, bloodsuckers! Hail, Azriel the Ghost! So thinks the reader plunging into Rice's latest supernatural epic, in which Azriel, the Wandering Babylonian Ghost who cannot die, replaces Rice's familiar casts of vampires and witches. The first half of the novel shows Rice (Memnoch the Devil, 1995, etc.) at her descriptive best, her purple pen limning Babylon's hanging gardens, golden passageways, and jeweled clothing. Young Azriel, a Jew who works for the Babylonian priests and whose best friend is the god Marduk, is murdered by a magician who coats Azriel's bones with heavy gold: Throughout the ages any magician who owns the bones can call forth Azriel, a rebel ghost and impudent genie. Rice imaginatively describes in depth the swimming spirit world of competing gods and ghosts who, unseen, walk the streets of Babylon, and the reader surrenders happily to their presence amid the ancient splendor. Azriel hops and skips through the centuries and through a number of masters until suddenly, seemingly unsummoned, appearing before a Fifth Avenue clothing store in time to see wealthy young Esther Belkin murdered, Azriel quickly kills the three assassins who've driven ice picks into her. But why is he here in this reelingly strange modern Babylon of skyscrapers and hurtling taxis? It's soon clear that Esther's death is the sacrifice of his own daughter to God by multibillionaire televangelist Gregory Belkin, high priest of the Temple of the Minds. Gregory has a worldwide following and is about to wipe out much of the earth's population so that he can "rise from the dead" and become the globe's Messiah. Can Azriel stop him? The novel is dedicated to GOD, who may find Rice's modern-day scenes plotted waveringly as she paddles about. Lesser readers may wish she'd stayed in Babylon, where their suspension of disbelief and her imaginative energies are at their strongest.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1613771738
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
Kuper’s black-heavy style, best used in his narrative work, here deadens jokes that need air and light: he’s a great talent...
A regular contributor to magazines as diverse as Time and Mad, Kuper collects a second batch of his “Eye of the Beholder” cartoons, all in the same basic pattern: “four panels of clues to guess which point of view your eyes are following.”
The answer is on the next page in a single, larger frame. Fortunately, Kuper breaks the form with regularity. Not that he changes his panel pattern, but his mostly wordless, woodcut style cartoons don’t strictly follow his dictum: some aren’t literal points of view, some are imagined visual histories, and some are the desires of his hapless figures. Many of Kuper’s visual puzzles are politically pointed, with the pay-off frame packing the punch of an editorial: four views of white people tanning are seen by a black janitor; various guns on a rack are ogled by a young boy; floating garbage is viewed by a mermaid; a defoliated forest is watched by Tarzan.The best comics are the most surprising ones: four different frames seen by, among others, a window washer, a crash-test dummy, a construction working using a jackhammer, and a new-born baby. Often the four views serve as a visual history, with the punch-line frame including the person visualizing the past: a hotel maid sees the various inhabitants of the room she’s cleaning; a piece of gum on someone’s shoe ends a sequence on the history of its manufacture. The wittiest pieces confound reality: a jar of pills views its consumer in various stages; a turkey flashes on its future as dinner; and the Grim Reaper surveys his victims. Kuper uses himself to great effect: circling sharks turn out to be the lawyers surrounding him at a table; trees being converted to wood products end up in his hand as pencils; and, funniest of all, scenes of an empty bookstore are his views at a book-signing.
Kuper’s black-heavy style, best used in his narrative work, here deadens jokes that need air and light: he’s a great talent who hasn’t yet found a subject suited to his style.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-56163-259-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: NBM
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
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