Crane’s witty romantic comedy debut will be best appreciated by those raised on a steady diet of MTV.
Two 20-something New Yorkers squabble and flirt their way across the country.
A laid back, music-obsessed dreamer in the Nick Hornby mold, struggling indie-rock producer Brady Gilbert is reasonably sure, after losing his rent-controlled apartment in a breakup, that a girlfriend is the last thing he needs. Still, he is intrigued when he moves in next door to Heaven Albright. Lissome, quirky and frequently obnoxious, Heaven pops into Brady’s apartment unannounced, opens his mail and generally finds ways to both fascinate and annoy him. A former PR flack and woefully inept waitress, Heaven is tossed from the hipster Asian restaurant where she works after one of her jokes goes too far. With time on her hands, she cheerfully oversteps all of Brady’s boundaries and insists on accompanying her new neighbor on a trip to Los Angeles, where he intends to check out and sign a talented high-school rock band. In L.A., Heaven crosses paths with her ex, a smarmy A&R rep for a big record company interested in the same band as Brady. After Heaven spends the night with his rival, Brady cannot decide what is worse, losing his band, or losing Heaven. The not-quite couple then stop in Seattle, where Brady hopes to present his improbable but inspired entrepreneurial idea—Cinnamilk—to Starbucks mastermind Howard Schultz. Good intentions, combined with poor judgment, result in the two getting arrested outside a vigil commemorating the death of Kurt Cobain. With a title taken from a Nirvana song and Brady’s fixation with obscure bands and even more obscure snack foods, Crane’s basic boy-meets-girl story is at times a bit too enamored of its own caffeine-fueled pop-culture cred.
Crane’s witty romantic comedy debut will be best appreciated by those raised on a steady diet of MTV.Pub Date: May 12, 2006
ISBN: 0-446-69572-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: 5 Spot/Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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
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
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