A fantasy tale with an ingenious and memorable premise.
In Riley’s (The Great Deflategate Conspiracy, 2015) novella, a 21st-century movie finds its way onto a theater screen in small-town 1950s New England.
Projectionist Shep Farrell and manager Leo D’Aleo are preparing for another mundane day of work at the Strand Theater in the all-white town of Enfield, Connecticut, when something extraordinary happens. As Shep is preparing to screen what he believes to be Creature from the Black Lagoon, the film mysteriously threads itself. The theater staff is astonished to discover, when the movie plays, that it’s unlike anything they’ve witnessed before—because it’s the 2018 superhero film Black Panther. Also alarming is the fact that the projector refuses to stop running even after Leo and Shep cut the power. In 1954, the film—which racist Leo describes as “a bunch of half naked Coloreds flying through space and shooting up white people”—causes a significant stir, and white crowds flock to the uncanny spectacle. Word soon reaches the White House; Vice President Richard Nixon attends a screening, and when he finds that the film can’t be stopped, he deems Black Panther a national security threat. The dialogue in Riley’s deeply imaginative novella vividly captures the politics of paranoia of 1950s America. For example, Nixon’s report to President Dwight Eisenhower states: “it appears to me as if [Marcus] Garvey directed this motion picture from the grave.” Meanwhile, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover accuses the “agitator Paul Robeson” of being behind the film simply because the performer once lived in Enfield. Riley also draws a damning caricature of the Eisenhower administration and the era’s casual racism. For instance, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles says that he’s alarmed by a Black Panther character’s “Africanized hair,” stating: “What are we to make of that Alfalfa hair-do?” The political figures are complex, conniving, and well-rounded, but Riley pays significantly less attention to his protagonist, Shep, who feels insufficiently fleshed out. However, this is a minor criticism of a daringly inventive novella that charts society’s ongoing struggle with racial bigotry and the role of cinema in challenging such prejudice.
A fantasy tale with an ingenious and memorable premise.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-941913-09-6
Page Count: 141
Publisher: The Nobby Works
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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