A sprawling, nearly plotless novel: Hannah shows quite authoritatively that he’s still the master of his craft. The...
The first outing in a decade from the great southern roustabout (Never Die, 1991, etc.) goes on a long tear through the lives of a motley crew of misfits living around a giant lake in the backwoods of Mississippi.
Hannah kicks it off on a raging blast of language and keeps winging higher and higher. The prologue is a standalone bit about a ramshackle roadhouse where men can buy bait, booze, and some under-the-counter pornography, and where the amenities are definitely lacking: “All this the parcels of its charm.” There’s little reason for this piece other than to establish the well-stocked lake as the central character of Hannah’s careening ode to those whose lives keep coming back to it. Among them are: Byron Egan, a onetime biker and addict turned tattooed preacher; Melanie, a 71-year-old widow with a patrician bearing that keeps heads turning—mostly, she stands by her window: “She watched for men like a teenager. She watched for wildlife like a child”; and Raymond, a disgraced ex-doctor who plays the saxophone in his wife’s band at a nearby casino. And then there’s the crazy couple on the other side of the lake who once tried to kill each other but now, in their post-traumatic dementia, run a camp for orphans. Lighting a match under everyone is Man Mortimer, a hustler and gigolo who hunts for women who’ve given up hope and recruits them for his rolling whorehouses: luxury SUVs with fogged windows and deluxe stereo systems. With hardly any more provocation than anyone else here (in true southern-gothic tradition, surreal violence flares up quite often in these pages), Mortimer goes on a random crime spree of nonlethal knifings that leaves everyone baffled, but ultimately not all that concerned.
A sprawling, nearly plotless novel: Hannah shows quite authoritatively that he’s still the master of his craft. The manufactured eccentricity of some of his recent short stories is absent here, but not his love of characters and language. A masterwork of southern beat terror gospel.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-811-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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 presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 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.
