An unappealing mix of empty slapstick and soapboxing.
A Three Stooges–like comedy with a dash of social philosophy.
Before readers can get to the story, they are presented with an awkward series of introductory sections—a dedication, an acknowledgment that encourages people to follow their dreams, a “Meet the Author” section that details the author’s proposed business ventures and inventions, a list of hobbies, a list of milestones in the author’s life, and a “Disclaimer” that explains the book consists of “thoughts that have crossed the minds of many generations gone on before us, those with us, and those to come”—none of which has much to do with what follows. Then the story itself is a jumble. It centers on the misadventures of four military buddies, Barry, Ken, Alfred and Greg—the latter three are described as “misfits”—who try the patience of their commanding officer by pulling pranks and acting like children. Most of the novel is straight exposition without much detail. Azreay’l writes of the trio, “Almost daily, they have pulled pranks on the commanding officer, executive officer, and most senior officers.” Only a few pranks are mentioned after that, including a hackneyed gag involving the running of underwear up a flagpole. Descriptions tend to be unnatural; at one point, a character’s tears “splash” on a table and, later on, a room “quietly grew to a whisper.” Much of the humor is derived from characters bumping into things or inexplicably falling down. The characters spend a lot of time laughing, ostensibly to indicate where readers should be laughing, too. But the dialogue is wooden, especially in comedy club scenes in the beginning and end in which the comedians mostly do crowd work, yelling at the audience or hitting on women among them. Elsewhere, there are long stretches of characters spouting one-sided rhetoric that comes off a bit unnaturally, as when comedian Keyonton bristles at an accusation of gay bashing—“I am not gay bashing, if anything I am word bashing. I am not the one who has power to say it is right or wrong, but if He says it is wrong, then that is good enough for me to know that it’s wrong in His sight”—or when Barry and Ken complain about Republicans “putting it to the middle and lower class” that year.
An unappealing mix of empty slapstick and soapboxing.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1483672915
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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