A smart, layered satire for historians and cultural critics alike.
Humor comes together in a sometimes-dark, often playful, and ultimately humanist satire of technology, media, and politics past and present in this fascinating debut novel by Schneider, a journalist and political commentator.
The story opens as the author clears out his grandfather’s attic. But the unenviable chore yields something unexpected: his great-grandfather’s writing and a strange, typewriterlike device that seems to have been part of a miraculous turn-of-the-century internet. The writings make up the rest of the novel as the great-grandfather, Sebastian Schneider, navigates his menial career as a typist for the Milwaukee Post in 1916. When Sebastian receives the device—called a Finger-Phone—from a colleague, he begins blogging his thoughts and feelings on the matters of the day, from women’s suffrage to the specter of Prohibition. Throughout, the text delivers plenty of laughs, portraying historical events without the perspective of hindsight and understanding and viewing Sebastian’s 20th-century ideas through 21st-century technology. His misadventures range from trying to buy firewood through Tinder to click-bait articles and spam messages promising male enhancement. These jokes start to feel redundant after a while, but the novel’s effective, deadpan prose is still chuckleworthy, and Sebastian’s haplessness allows for plenty of situation comedy as well, like when he ends up drunk at a teetotaler rally. He uses his blog as an outlet to voice his opinions and share his misadventures, but as time goes on, he feels increasingly alone and disconnected. This idea isn’t particularly novel, but the story ultimately goes deeper and addresses why technology seems to yield these negative feelings. Indeed, while the reader laughs at Sebastian’s slip-ups and misunderstandings, the novel also indicts his sexism, self-certainty, and tendency to speak from ignorance. And at the same time, while the story mocks plenty of the more absurd aspects of the digital age, it also shows how Sebastian gains a genuine friendship through his online interactions—a relationship his own prejudices might have kept him from in the real world. In this way, the reader comes away with the sense that this is not a baldfaced indictment of technology but a nuanced treatment on the ways in which we abuse it.
A smart, layered satire for historians and cultural critics alike.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-04447-6
Page Count: 271
Publisher: Pelham Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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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