Unsettling, endearing, and brilliant.
A dysfunctional Louisiana family spins out of control in this novel by Dasgupta (The Sea Singer, 2016, etc.).
Barn is a 7-year-old boy who wishes that he had the power of flight. At the beginning of the story, he climbs up on the roof of the family home in rural Louisiana, having glued feathers to his skin. It’s easy to understand why he wants to fly away; his father, referred to as Uncle Gerald, is a ne’er-do-well who’s wanted for all manner of criminal offences. Barn’s cousin Mutty, the novel’s first-person narrator, soon convinces Barn that he actually can’t fly. Mutty lives with his mother and Barn in a boarded-up farmhouse. He also has a fascination with Pepper, a mysterious, vociferous young woman who shows up at the farm on a regular basis. Pepper and Mutty aren’t friends, but they often have uninhibited, rough sex. After Uncle Gerald is arrested, Barn starts refusing to talk, and soon the family’s world descends into turmoil. Another character, referred to as The Dirty Man, shows up in town—a chilling figure from Pepper’s sordid past. Mutty’s estranged father, Pierre, reveals that The Dirty Man, otherwise known as Brody, bought Pepper from another man named Mallow, and he now owns “her skin and everything in between.” The Dirty Man is intent on taking her away, but she’s a fighter (and a biter). She’s also growing emotionally closer to Mutty, who will do anything to protect those close to him. This is a deeply idiosyncratic novel with a wildly unique descriptive style. The opening reads like a book for early readers: “Cow, cow, cow, went the moo, and cat, cat, cat went the meow, and dog, dog, dog, went the bark.” This approach continues throughout, although it becomes rather more adult in tone after Mutty and Pepper’s visit to a sex toy shop: “Leather, leather, leather went the thong. Zzzz, zzzz, zzzz went the vibrate.” Mutty is a desperately unreliable narrator who offers a deliciously distorted reading of events. At one point he remarks, “The man walked up to us. Pepper’s nails were deep into my skin.” This is repeated as “Pepper walked up to us. The man’s nails were deep into my skin.” And then, “My skin walked up to us, and Pepper’s nails were deep into the man’s skin.” It’s akin to experimental poetry, and readers are regularly left piecing together fragments while searching for meaning. It takes some work on the reader’s part, but it’s well worth the effort. Dasgupta is an ingenious writer with a painterly eye for detail, as when Mutty confides: “all I could do was sit and watch Barn play under the pepper sprinkled sun.” He also has an equal power to disturb—as when Mutty buys strawberry-flavored edible underwear at a store as a snack for Barn to eat. This is courageously strange writing that will intrigue and beguile the reader from the get-go, and it boasts a denouement that would make Quentin Tarantino squirm.
Unsettling, endearing, and brilliant.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60489-211-6
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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