An often funny but meandering tale with a shameless narrator.
A fictionalized, satirical memoir presents the life of a confidence man in 18th-century America.
George Sperryhawke is the son of a wayward father, a domestic who moved from England to the New World and luxuriated in drink while piling up insurmountable debt. He leaves home in his teens and finds dreary work in a candle factory, but he improves his lot when he wins the favor of Mrs. Esther Higginbottom, an older woman as gullible as she is wealthy. She finances his college education under the impression that he will eventually become an educated man of God, but George is prone to find trouble. He impregnates a young girl, Harriet, whom he mistakenly believes hails from a family of means but turns out to be a penniless servant. He flees and boards a ship destined for the Indies, and as a result of equally remarkable luck and artifice, he talks his way onto a ship as its new chaplain. When Capt. Dobbin falls deathly ill, he entrusts the purchase of 15 tons of English tea to the young reprobate. Inexperienced in the tea trade, George buys Dutch tea instead at a bargain, avoiding the considerable duty owed to the Crown. That maneuver imperils the ship and its crew, however, because the importation of unstamped Dutch tea amounts to smuggling. The memoir is written in the first person from George’s perspective—he proves a tantalizingly unreliable narrator, incapable of resisting the lure of self-aggrandizing hyperbole. He claims to have negotiated the Louisiana Purchase for Thomas Jefferson and to have coaxed more than 1,000 women into sexual dalliances. Debut author Smith reliably captures the vernacular of the time, as well as George’s pleasantly comical amalgam of frivolity and melodrama. Also, the plot is energetically paced; George’s life is almost unfathomably eventful. There isn’t much to the story beyond its comedic companionableness. George is clever but astonishingly amoral, and his lack of a conscience ultimately renders him a shallow protagonist.
An often funny but meandering tale with a shameless narrator.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-976773-00-6
Page Count: 197
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
