by Chuck Palahniuk ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1999
A morbidly fascinating black fantasy about a young cult member’s rise to fame and his fall from grace, written by West Coast novelist Palahniuk (Fight Club, 1996). When an airliner goes down, the first thing the authorities look for amid the wreckage is the —black box— that contains a recording of the pilot’s last words, which are usually grim but fairly restrained—almost always because the pilot doesn—t expect (almost always) to die. Tender Branson’s situation is unusual: the last survivor of an obscure American religion known as the Creedish Death Cult, he is dictating his confession into the black box of a 747 that he knows will soon crash somewhere over the Australian outback. —What you—ve found,— he declares, —is the story of what went wrong.— That’s putting it softly. Like all Creedalists, Branson, raised for a life of obscure service to strangers, chose to hire himself out as an unpaid domestic while still in his teens. Probably he would have spent his life keeping house for the yuppie vulgarians who took him in, but an FBI raid on the Creedish Church compound in Nebraska resulted in a mass suicide within the cult. Since then, surviving Creedalists living in the field have been killing themselves on a regular basis, so that Branson is soon the only Creedalist left. As such, he becomes a genuine celebrity, complete with an agent who gets him book contracts, movie deals—and with a good lawyer intent on winning him uncontested title to all Creedish Church properties. A marriage is arranged for him . . . and televised live from the Super Bowl during halftime. But things turn sour when evidence mounts that many of the suicides were, in fact, murders—and that Branson’s brother Adam may still be alive. Is Branson a serial killer? Or Adam? Can they ever lead a normal life again? Brilliant, engrossing, substantial, and fun: Palahniuk carves out credible, moving dramas from situations that seemed simply outlandish and sad on the evening news. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04702-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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