Felske, a veteran of the New York fashion scene, makes a fiction debut marked more by sheer chutzpah than grace. Still, this much leadfooted satire commands attention, if nothing else. Behind every tottering runway diva, every pouting cover girl, every buffed swimsuit babe, the author would have us believe, there's one guy who sleeps with them all. Here it's narrator Nick, who loves the breed of woman he calls ``Thing,'' that rare Amazon who renders civilian females hopelessly schlubby by comparison. Astride his Harley, a copy of The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh jammed in a pocket, the chest of some Scandinavian demigoddess pressed against his leather-jacketed back, Nick knows he has a leg up on the average male. Mercifully, Felske makes almost no effort to redeem this fool for sex. Cruising Gotham's fashionable haunts in search of fresh material, Nick is more an artist of physical pleasure than the misogynist he at first appears to be; nevertheless, he receives his overdue comeuppance in spades by book's end. Though Nick jets to Miami's South Beach on a brief detour of debauchery, his story is fundamentally one of New York days: the flashy parties he promotes, the circuit of trendy enclaves where people pose fabulously and smoke a lot, the whole scene populated by a pumped-up tribe of neo-Cheeverians endlessly in search of love. By minimizing Nick's obsession with his mother's untimely death, Felske avoids the Jay McInerney first-timer's error of laying too much blame for the indiscretions of an American rude boy on the altar of family. There ain't much tale here, but Nick's unrepentant offensiveness carries things on (on Eurotrash: ``I didn't give a shit if they were German, French, Italian, Russian, or Swedish. We kicked all their asses in wars and still can''). Tom Wolfe rewrites American Gigolo. Fun stuff. (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-517-70035-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Catch-22 is also concerned with some of war's horrors and atrocities, and it is at times painfully grim.
Catch-22 is an unusual, wildly inventive comic novel about World War II, and its publishers are planning considerable publicity for it.
Set on the tiny island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean Sea, the novel is devoted to a long series of impossible, illogical adventures engaged in by the members of the 256th bombing squadron, an unlikely combat group whose fanatical commander, Colonel Cathcart, keeps increasing the men's quota of missions until they reach the ridiculous figure of 80. The book's central character is Captain Yossarian, the squadron's lead bombardier, who is surrounded at all times by the ironic and incomprehensible and who directs all his energies towards evading his odd role in the war. His companions are an even more peculiar lot: Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who loved to win parades; Major Major Major, the victim of a life-long series of practical jokes, beginning with his name; the mess officer, Milo Minderbinder, who built a food syndicate into an international cartel; and Major de Coverley whose mission in life was to rent apartments for the officers and enlisted men during their rest leaves. Eventually, after Cathcart has exterminated nearly all of Yossarian's buddies through the suicidal missions, Yossarian decides to desert — and he succeeds.
Catch-22 is also concerned with some of war's horrors and atrocities, and it is at times painfully grim.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1961
ISBN: 0684833395
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1961
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
APPRECIATIONS
SEEN & HEARD
The fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48882-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
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