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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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