Immaculately detailed and emotionally explosive: this is roiling, riveting stuff, of a piece with stylish, edgy movies like...
A brisk, savvy debut gives new meaning to the term “identity crisis,” as Clevenger builds a neo-noir cliffhanger from the story of an unusually gifted man whose migraines drive him to drug overdoses—but who then has to reinvent himself to stay one step ahead of his past.
For John Dolan Vincent, the predicament is familiar: Following yet another resuscitation by the EMT and ER personnel, he’s awaiting psychiatric evaluation in a Hollywood hospital to determine whether he’s suicidal. He knows the drill, but he also has another advantage—as far as his minders know, he’s Daniel John Fletcher. When his Evaluator arrives and the questions begin, Johnny knows he has to be credible in order to be released, and once released that he immediately has to manufacture a new identity. As a child, a troubled family and antisocial tendencies, exacerbated by his having a sixth finger on his left hand, hid his phenomenal intelligence and his gifts for math and mimicry. Doing homework for hire and forging his parents’ signatures naturally led to more trouble, until an arrest for forging a prescription gave him a juvenile record and jail time. Now in his 20s, any digging into one of his forged personas—which would be inevitable should he fail one of the suicide evaluations—would unmask him and bring more jail time. More than that, some of his work as a master forger has been for the mob, and what he knows is extremely dangerous to them. Having escaped them in the past, they’ve now found him as Daniel Fletcher—and have come to the hospital to wait for his release. Even worse, Johnny is in love, and Keara’s life hangs in the balance too.
Immaculately detailed and emotionally explosive: this is roiling, riveting stuff, of a piece with stylish, edgy movies like Memento and Requiem For a Dream.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2002
ISBN: 1-931561-15-X
Page Count: 201
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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