Political satire 101. Or, when targets balloon as large as Robbins’s, the fun goes out of deflation.
A debut novel in which satirical darts strike political targets that don’t move around a lot.
Like his father before him, Jeremiah Greenfield is an accomplished liar. Unlike his father, Jeremiah doesn’t care much for lying. But truth-telling isn’t very satisfactory either, he discovers, since few seem eager to listen to him, and those that do listen hate what they hear. So Jeremiah marks time more or less aimlessly—getting good at lying, but not doing much with this talent or caring much about anything at all, really, until his little-league job on a small town newspaper turns big-league indeed by dint of an almost accidental scoop. Catapulted into fame and fortune, he becomes powerful. His opinions begin to matter. People seek him out to bask in the brilliance of his neat way with a lie. Among the seekers are representatives of the Committee to Resurrect the American Presidency (CRAP), a shadowy organization that bribes or scares dissenters into behaving the way it wants them to. CRAP informs Jeremiah that he’s presidential timber, the ideal candidate to head a new third party ticket. He cottons to CRAP’s view of him, but what he doesn't realize is that he’s being set up. His subtextual job is to siphon off votes, thus guaranteeing the election of CRAP’s real choice, the incumbent, no mean shakes of a liar himself. Jeremiah outperforms expectations, however, and is suddenly in danger of winning. CRAP is forced to step in, and Jeremiah is forced to step out (in a manner of speaking), this to the dismay of not many except the one or two who, against heavy odds, have managed to find him endurable.
Political satire 101. Or, when targets balloon as large as Robbins’s, the fun goes out of deflation.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2000
ISBN: 0-9676127-5-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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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