A sledgehammer to the American dream.
Lish (Life Is With People, 2012) makes his fiction debut with a love story set in the sewers of the American dream.
Undocumented immigrant Zou Lei lands in the U.S. and enters a wrestling match with her new country, trying to hold a job and evade deportation. Meanwhile, a scarred (physically and emotionally) veteran named Skinner struggles with nightmares of war in a nation that claims to support his service but doesn’t know where he fits now. When these two people meet each other in a dingy stairwell, there’s an instant connection—a palpable sense of need. Together, they negotiate the streets of a tough city in an even tougher country that, perhaps, doesn’t care about them at all. Lish’s novel is angry but compassionate; he sees his characters clearly without romanticizing them or their impoverished experiences. His version of New York is garish, the accumulation of detail—the scum of forgotten food courts, people streaming from subways—becoming surreal. The prose feels in constant motion, and without quotation marks around any of the dialogue, the reader strains to hear the characters above the din. Nevertheless, Lish often avoids gloominess; there’s a velocity to his writing and moments of mundane, fleeting beauty, as when a cellphone "lit up indigo in [Zou Lei’s] hands for several moments shining through her fingers.” The book feels, perhaps, a little too long, a little too overwhelming—in ways both intentional and not—but it also shows the scary truth about who’s allowed to prosper in this country, ultimately making clear the irony underlying one of the novel’s early descriptions of the U.S.: “You don’t have to be rich. If somebody wants it, it will be theirs.”
A sledgehammer to the American dream.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9885183-3-9
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Tyrant Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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