From master black comedian Friedman (The Collected Short Fiction. . . , 1995, etc.) comes a dry, mordant take on the old story of the reluctant hit man. William Binny, a middle-aged widower and father, is an unemployed poultry worker in an unnamed town that could be Little Rock, Arkansas. Binny spends a lot of time reading big books- -Thackeray, Emerson, Gibbon's Decline and Fall—yet he remains a simple, not very bright guy who can only land a job turning on the timers at a suntanning salon. Extremely protective of his 11- year-old daughter, Binny longs for security and ``something useful'' to do. Enter Valentine Peabody, a mysterious Brit who claims that he works for a reclusive multinational billionaire named Gnu, a sensitive man who'd been tormented by childhood bullies and now wants revenge against his tormentors. Peabody thinks that Binny would be the perfect assassin—a quiet, efficient Vietnam vet, completely unknown. Binny, when presented with large sums of money, at first hesitates, then takes on the challenge of becoming a hired killer. Friedman proceeds to take us on a very silly ride—first to Miami, where Binny deals with gangs of retired Catskills comics, a bald model, an Arab who plays bar mitzvahs, and a target already more dead than alive. Binny next goes to Tokyo, where he stumbles on a parade of factory workers all brandishing inflatable penises. And he ends up in New York, where his daughter is sucked into the world of movie production. This simple hero takes it all in with an unflinching wonder, and as he bumbles about, Friedman manages to suggest that it might actually be possible to be both a (somewhat inept) assassin and a really nice guy. Not his heaviest, deepest work, but Friedman's satiric eye is keenly focused in this pleasant romp about the limits of a father's love. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1996
ISBN: 1-55611-499-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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