Dazzling and off-putting at the same time.
A theatrical first novel from Bosworth (stories: A Burden of Earth, 1995) folds fanciful literary time travel into the more earthbound coming-of-age travails of a young girl in late-’60s New Jersey.
Seventh-grader Rachel Finch is asthmatic and a seriously dorky bookworm whose passions run to Bertram Russell, the Dewey decimal system, and Franz Kafka, her activity confined as much by her overprotective father as by her asthma. At home, Rachel witnesses the growing rift between her parents. At school, her racially diverse classmates, who mixed together so easily in earlier grades, are fragmenting into angry cliques. And Rachel is getting hate notes, very possibly from her adored older sister. But Rachel escapes her unhappy daily life when she travels with S-Man, a politically correct if not terribly exciting superhero who travels through time to save literary greats from disaster. With Rachel’s help, he loosens Shakespeare’s writer’s block, stops Louis XIV from banning Diderot’s encyclopedia, and saves Chinua Achebe’s family from a bombing. In between archly highbrow escapades, Rachel develops a new friendship in real time. Rachel Fish shares Rachel Finch’s (if you like the book, you’ll also like the name similarity) literary passions and is equally if more bravely dorky. Rachel Finch hates keeping her life with S-Man a secret from this friend who is pulling her into real-life adventure, and Rachel’s two lives begin to converge when S-Man’s nemesis Laff Riot turns up in Teaneck. First, Rachel must help S-Man save all the great artists and thinkers who have ever been censured by society from a paradise of forgetfulness that would obviate their achievements. (If this sounds vague, it is.) Then S-Man helps her when a crazy Vietnam vet takes over Back-to-School night with Rachel’s schoolmates as paramilitary underlings. Lots of fireworks, literal and literary, but the writing is so self-consciously clever that even when a major character dies, the reader is likely to be unmoved.
Dazzling and off-putting at the same time.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-609-61103-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
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
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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