Next book

DOG DAYS

Comic coming-of-ager pits a pair of Boston computer geeks against an aging mafioso and the insular neighborhood he controls. Jewelry-encrusted, cannelloni-chomping crime lord Davio Giaccalone, a denizen of the linked stories in Lyons’s nicely turned collection, The Last Good Man (1993), now symbolizes all that’s bad, violent, old, and stupid for Reilly and Evan, a pair of workaholic, arrested-adolescent programmers who share a not-so-cheap apartment in Boston’s rapidly gentrifying working-class Italian North End neighborhood. Reilly, the Irish- nebbish narrator, is especially sensitive to the abusive taunts he receives from Giaccalone’s weight-lifting, hood-in-training nephew Tony. The latter can’t understand what Maria Bava, the neighborhood’s prized sexpot, sees in Reilly, and he uses a dispute over a bill in his uncle’s cappuccino joint to beat up Reilly and vandalize his car. Reilly, however, likes Maria only as a friend, having fallen for, and then been jilted by, the be-freckled Jeanie. He’s also having problems on the job, where a bug-filled Internet application he’s developing with Evan for a Microsoft competitor may never function properly. Lyons creates several hilarious scenes showing how craven, nasty, and hypocritical the software business can get, and then he has Reilly, feeling a need to patch up his pride, kidnap Coco, Giaccalone’s racing greyhound, for ransom that he doesn’t really need. Reilly soon discovers, though, that he’s no match for old world menace and ends up escaping to Florida with the dog, Evan, and Maria, whose relatives are higher up the criminal ladder than Giaccalone and are eager to enforce a truce after she announces that Reilly is her fiancÇ. Alas, Reilly gets cold feet about committing to Maria—but after she goes to Russia with the Peace Corps, he lights out after her. Lyons’s antihero whines and pines a bit overmuch, but his debut novel charms with its dead-on satires of fey software drones and snide Gen-Xers who—ve swapped slacker ennui for angst-filled ambition.

Pub Date: June 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-684-84000-6

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998

Categories:

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 33


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • National Book Award Finalist

Next book

A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 33


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • National Book Award Finalist

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

Categories:
Next book

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

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

Categories:
Close Quickview