Pure, ridiculous fun for its own sake.
A debut collection of off-the-wall characters who meet their destiny at a seafood restaurant in Las Vegas in a series of linked comedic vignettes.
In one of these stories, young Jeremy Ekips, with no qualifications, applies for a job at Vageneral Cereals, and his perfunctory interview goes on a tangent when he describes his religion, which features a daffy creation myth of six squabbling gods forging the universe. In another tale, Wright, a used-trampoline salesman, is aggrieved by arrogant jingle writer David’s disrespectful treatment, so he contacts IZU, an assassination company offering elaborate package deals. Elsewhere, Roy Mackleburns, a Sherlock Holmes manqué of 1930, is investigating cases along with his sociopath sidekick, a hardened doorknob thief. Jenny, meanwhile, is a frustrated mom who wins $150 quintillion in a lottery and abandons her children to go to Las Vegas, where she gambles away most of her money immediately. Vegas is where all the characters’ paths converge, fatefully, at King Club Decker’s Casino, Hotel and Shrimp House. The book comes to an end with a “Foreword by Alexander Q. Sweisenhower,” lauding author O’Neal for attempting to change the way books are written—and failing. In truth, the whole raison d’être for this collection is the opener, in which boys steal a government time machine from Area 51 and use it to go back to the 1970s to save Karen Carpenter from starvation. Overall, O’Neal offers an absurdist, almost Dada-ist mix of short stories, fragments, and burlesques here that somewhat resemble the free-form prose fiction of the great comic innovator Spike Milligan. In the end, readers learn that this chaotic narrative was a collaborative story that the characters wrote for a lark. However, if the joke is on the reader, it’s no less enjoyable for that. It effectively showcases the writer’s bright, gonzo imagination, and one can take this collection in that same anything-goes spirit.
Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5147-6275-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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