A more robust comic sense might have redeemed this plotless work; no such luck.
Here’s another happy-go-lucky loser to join the protagonists of Apology for Big Rod (1997) and Nice (2001); Holdefer’s fourth novel is less inventive than its predecessors.
Stanley Mercer is the product of a small-town American childhood; he’s back in the U.S. after a 14-year absence. His career in minor league baseball had taken him to Latin America and eventually France, where he’d lived for four years until his French girlfriend dumped him and his French boss fired him. Now he’s staying with his brother in Chicago without a clue what to do next, until his sister-in-law points out an ad. An elementary school in the small town of Legion, Iowa, is looking for a substitute teacher. Stan’s the man. You might think his colorful past would fill out his character, but no. He’s a blank, and a blank he remains. Holdefer casts around for items of interest in this dull town. Stanley is renting a farmhouse that used to be a meth lab until the cops closed it. He finds $640 in an old jacket; in a wasted opportunity, no tweaker returns to claim his stash. There’s a huge hog farm nearby which poses an excremental threat, fulfilled when raw sewage spills into the river. As for Stanley’s sex life, it’s unproductive. A Chicago nurse’s email suggestion that they sleep together meant literally that: no sex, as Stanley finds out too late. This leaves Amy Rawlings, the mother of one of Stanley’s students. She’s off-limits, a gut feeling tells Stanley, but when did he pay attention to them? Amy has a stormy marriage to a realtor who’s also a tweaker (no avoiding that meth) and a wild man. The only drama in the novel flows from that marriage, leaving Stanley on the periphery. The jig is up for him when the principal discovers he’s been teaching without a degree.
A more robust comic sense might have redeemed this plotless work; no such luck.Pub Date: June 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-57962-265-7
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
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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