A mildly entertaining revolving door of blue-collar caricatures.
A day laborer travels across America to Hollywood with dreams of screenwriting success in this middling adventure of misfits by debut author Fazzini.
Self-described “freak magnet” William Rand is content to scrape together a living working temporary construction jobs rather than settle into a permanent career. His girlfriend, Linda, with whom he lives, wants him to do something more and encourages him to sign up for a class at the local co0mmunity college. With sudden dreams of grandeur, William takes up a screenwriting course. After watching an infomercial for a screenwriting contest run by famous actor Bill Brooks, he believes it’s a sign to take action. William leaves Linda and the East Coast for Hollywood to personally deliver his script to Brooks. While cutting across the continent by bus, the oafish William meets a host of eclectic working-class personalities who exasperate the protagonist’s plainness by comparison. It’s telling that a “troll” of a man with questionable personal hygiene and an obsession with Cap’n Crunch cereal comes off as having more depth than William—even if not by much. Among the more outlandish characters are a monster-truck-driving little person, a black Nebraska farmer with vitiligo, and an Eastern European woman who grants wishes at a premium (William is the only one on the bus who makes a wish and pays). Less satire than cartoonish fun, the novel cycles through characters at a rapid pace before they lose their interest. The only constant is William, who is too dull to get in the way most times, and Eli Karras, Brooks’ deranged stalker who unbeknownst to William is also headed west to take revenge on the actor for his mother’s death. The novel is no On The Road, but there could be worse ways to pass the time during a long car ride.
A mildly entertaining revolving door of blue-collar caricatures.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1502838476
Page Count: 154
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2015
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 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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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