A conspiracy story buoyed by childlike weirdness and heart.
This surreal fantasy finds a woman legally bound to a short, hairy man of unknown origin.
Ella Pearson lives in the City, though she’d love nothing more than to farm or roam the beach. She’s a marketing executive, dating a kind (if oblivious) man named Andy, whose young daughter, Clara, loves to tinker with broken appliances. One night, having decided to break up with Andy, Ella returns to their apartment to find someone in Clara’s room. The intruder is “exceptionally hairy, but so diminutive, with pudgy cheeks, as though he were equal parts chipmunk and man.” Ella wonders if her prescription of Represitol hasn’t triggered hallucinations or paranoia but calls the police anyway. When it’s revealed that Clara let the caveman inside the apartment, the police tell Ella that his removal is now a task for Social Services. Meanwhile, someone has vandalized the Temple of the First Assembly, and Ella’s firm, CCI, helps with the church’s response. When Ella’s boss, Warner, notices her exhaustion, he suggests a vacation to East Gish, her hometown. Later, she finds a picture of a childhood friend, Timmy Crace, and wonders why she barely recalls him. In his absurd, endearing tale, Rau (The Ghost, Josephine, 2015) pokes fun at religion, officialdom, and parenthood while examining life’s larger questions. His vicious sense of humor, clearly not intended to please everyone, is incisive, as when churchgoers fill the pews “with the rote order of overfed livestock.” The author’s dedication to portraying bureaucracy as inane is commendable, to the point where the reader wishes Ella would just slap Agent Sickens from the Office of Sentient Affairs (“Ms. Pearson, if that’s what the file says, then that’s where you live”). As a nightmarish plot surrounds Ella, she learns to detest the caveman (eventually named Ernie) less and less. Rau succeeds in drawing readers into his woolly world, but the audience will need patience while the narrative gropes for a stopping point.
A conspiracy story buoyed by childlike weirdness and heart.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-88431-7
Page Count: 435
Publisher: SmallPub
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
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
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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