A boisterous, persistently fun adventure story.
A debut fantasy about an Illinois grad student who goes to various places that share more than a few similarities with familiar movies and TV shows.
George Preston is a 27-year-old working on his dissertation in the year 2000. One day, he opens his bathroom door and sees a rainy city outside at street level, despite the fact that his apartment is on the third floor. He soon figures out that the rainy day is in the future, but then, after a short while, someone sticks a gun in his face—and George suddenly wakes up somewhere else. In this new place, he meets Dirk Hendricks and J.P. Ryder, characters from the 1990s sci-fi television series Hidden Agendas, who demand to know what he remembers. Soon, George is dodging bullets, and then he wakes up in yet another universe, stealing treasure with Pistol Kramer, a thrill-seeking adventurer from the movies. George moves from universe to universe in different ways, but wherever he goes, he keeps seeing a familiar man, who may be the only one who can explain what’s happening to him. But the mysterious man isn’t exactly forthcoming; sometimes he’s sympathetic to George’s plight, and other times he’s outright antagonistic. George has no option but to traverse assorted universes and hope for a return to his perfectly normal life. This witty story enjoys parodying recognizable films and TV shows; Hidden Agendas, for example, is an obvious play on The X-Files, complete with a “Gum-chewing Man,” and George later finds himself in a role akin to a certain popular, fictional MI6 agent. Deason layers on smart satire, as well, largely through his protagonist’s self-awareness; for example, George recognizes the innate racism of the Indiana Jones–esque Kramer. The myriad worlds are colorful, with each appearing to George as they would onscreen, such as a 1950s sitcom that’s all in black and white. The likable protagonist, meanwhile, ultimately sees the people he meets as more than just characters, sparking an intriguing question: could one of them cross into George’s world? However, the ending, while emphatically resolving the plot, is familiar from other stories and may be too predictable for some readers.
A boisterous, persistently fun adventure story.Pub Date: July 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5232-2714-3
Page Count: 136
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 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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