Keeping Portland weird with a well-written tale of an American insurgency.
In the midst of a slow apocalypse, a defiant young organizer takes up arms against her local government and empowers her community to take care of itself.
This second novel by Parzybok (Couch, 2008) employs a thoughtful—and surprisingly realistic—approach to offering commentary on separatist movements. We open in a near-future Portland, Oregon, where a long drought has emptied the Columbia River and left the city cut off from America. Far from descending into a Mad Max frenzy of mutants and violence, the city continues much as it was, with bookstores and coffee shops and local politics holding sway over its citizens. But there’s just not enough water to go around. It makes quite a stir when young barista Renee Gorski pulls off the brazen heist of a government water truck. Assuring her boyfriend, Zach, that things won’t get out of hand, she adopts the moniker the press bestows upon her: Maid Marian. Together with her “Green Rangers,” she carves out a block of neighborhoods with about 50,000 citizens and declares “Sherwood Nation” to be a sovereign state. The mechanics of the coup are interesting, and while there are some nods to Occupy and other protests against inequality—“A system that criminalizes a whistleblower is wanting in introspection,” Renee tells a reporter—Parzybok takes a rational and well-measured approach to depicting a community uprising. While Renee makes progress, she’s also forced to compromise quite often, as when she hires a local drug dealer as sheriff of their little country. If there’s a villain, it’s probably the conflicted, closeted gay mayor of Portland, Brandon Bartlett, but he's really a figurehead who would rather be playing video games. She’s not so much fighting “The Man” as much as the system he represents.
Keeping Portland weird with a well-written tale of an American insurgency.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61873-086-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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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