A depressing read, despite an ending that offers some triumph.
In Blanchard’s (Mourning Doves After the Fire, 2010) fantasy novel, a large rat colony is ruled by a good king until a rat soldier usurps power and the city hires exterminators.
“Life for the rats was always futile and wretched—an endless pursuit of something to eat.” That’s the case for even the best-run, safest refuges, such as the abandoned movie palace where Indio—a blind mole rat—has long ruled his huge colony. Most rats live only a few years but Indio is 30, giving him wisdom and experience in making rules, handling disputes, giving advice, and assigning punishments for sins such as shirking forage duties. Indio’s soldier rats provide enforcement; one is the high-ranking, ambitious Matthias. He dislikes Nicholas, Indio’s son and heir, and is determined to rule the colony himself someday, even though Hildegard, a fortuneteller rat, has warned him that he won’t live long. Matthias prepares an elaborate plan to surreptitiously eliminate the heir, which succeeds brilliantly; the unsuspecting Indio decides to make Matthias his new heir and guardian until Maxwell, his younger son, comes of age. Matthias repays his king by shoving him into an overflowing sewer, then taking over the colony and imposing draconian rules while ignoring duller responsibilities. He enjoys assigning punishments, though, including the most horrifying: being stuck to flypaper for three days. Soon the city goes to war against rats, giving the colony new survival challenges. Blanchard’s overcrowded animal colony ruled by an iron paw owes an obvious debt to the 1972 novel Watership Down by Richard Adams, to whom the book is dedicated. Like that author, he understands his characters as animals bound by their animal natures, which is a plus for the book as a whole. Blanchard has a harder task, though, because city rats just don’t have the inherent appeal of Watership Down’s wild rabbits: indeed, the huge colony is more than a little horrifying. The novel acknowledges this, but with scene after scene of brutal, bloody, meaningless deaths, Blanchard perhaps succeeds too well in illustrating the “futile and wretched” life of rats.
A depressing read, despite an ending that offers some triumph.Pub Date: May 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4834-4938-8
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: June 22, 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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