Payne—who formed his own press and self-published this novel, his first, in 1993—shoots for Holden Caulfield but winds up with Ferris Bueller in this overly long pastiche of teen clichÇs and YA fantasies. Nick Twisp is a precocious 14-year-old Californian with divorced parents. His floozy mother neglects him, while his equally libidinous father alternately avoids and exploits poor Nick. Naturally, Nick is obsessed with losing his virginity and hopes to do so with the girl of his dreams, Sheeni, a pretentious would-be teen philosopher who longs to run off to Paris. To win her, Nick involves himself in a variety of absurd capers, including: burning down half of Berkeley after jettisoning a trailer stolen from his mother and one of her boyfriends; getting himself thrown out of his mother's house so that he can live with his father and thus be closer to Sheeni (only to see her transfer to a French-speaking school farther away); tricking a naãve girl into drugging Sheeni's roommate; applying for a scholarship to study in India; and finally disappearing, only to reappear in drag so as to be closer to the girl who has grown to hate him because of his increasingly annoying and failed machinations. Payne uses Nick as a vehicle to deliver many funny set-pieces, yet he steamrolls right over anything resembling real emotion, as Nick possesses none of the fallibility or social awareness of other fictional diary-writers—the title character, for instance, of Sue Townsend's much more compelling The Adrian Mole Diaries (1986). Meanwhile, Payne's obvious verbal skills betray him as he tries too hard to impress—``sobriquet,'' ``hirsute virility,'' and ``tumescent loins'' improbably appearing in Nick's very first entry. Payne's talent occasionally peaks through this John Hughes- like romp, but hold out—and hope for—a better, more mature second effort.
Pub Date: April 14, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-47693-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
18
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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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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