A satire with hilarious leaps of imagination and a solid core of societal engagement.
Rehor’s debut is a gonzo sci-fi comedy about a near-future world of corporate stranglehold where a programmer trying to escape his past may threaten the future.
When readers first meet Billy Glover, he’s pointing a gun at his dad—and his week only goes downhill from there. That near-patricide turns out to be Billy’s memory, and remembrances of his late dad’s abuse still haunt him in real life. (For example, his dad once gave him a “reverse surprise birthday party,” in which he was promised a celebration but instead ended up raking leaves.) Billy hasn’t fallen far from the tree, though: whereas his dad first worked in psyops for the government during World War II and then developed a new character for Disney, Billy is working on an entertainment system that will allow people to experience real or synthetic memories—the iRemember. He needs the job, as his other options include grim “work camps” for the unemployed or the prospect of joining the terrorist Linux Underground. But when he starts finding copies of one of his childhood drawings around the office, he realizes that he may have more to worry about—including a possibly malfunctioning artificial intelligence. This plot description might make the novel sound like a taut techno-thriller, but Rehor manages something even more impressive here: a hilarious, satirical look at the modern world that deftly balances ridiculous events with some exploration of Billy’s character. Billy may be surrounded by networked appliances—even the coffee maker has a limited AI—but that fact merely emphasizes his sincere isolation, and he remains engaging no matter what’s going on in the near-surreal world around him. There’s a faintly Philip K. Dick-ian sense of paranoiac uncertainty mixed in with Billy’s struggles, but there’s still a lot of laughs as well.
A satire with hilarious leaps of imagination and a solid core of societal engagement.Pub Date: May 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5330-3688-9
Page Count: 206
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 26, 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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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