A dark romp featuring delightfully crackling dialogue and the mental gymnastics of a protagonist so on edge he tries to...
Will Regan, former copy clerk–turned–35-year-old daydreamer, reflects on his increasingly high-stakes encounters with three seemingly disconnected people in Dublin, a place he’s never left.
As the Dante invocation in the title suggests, the trio circulating in and out of Regan’s days contribute to hellish circumstances. An observer who acted for years as the eyes for his blind mother, Regan sees patterns everywhere. He’s drawn to symmetry by the desire to know if coincidences exist or if fate prevails, a conversation that deepens when he befriends brooding priest Ciaran Crowe. One pattern that Regan mixes up is chronology: he randomly weaves together the absurd consequences set off by seeing Joseph Mary Danaher, a bully from his childhood who is now a burglar responsible for killing an elderly woman. This storytelling foible adds both suspense and levity. It’s often Regan’s acquiescence to others that causes trouble rather than anything he instigates. Danaher invites himself to use Regan’s place as the hideaway for a padlocked bag. Regan saves the second of the trio, Chester Maher, from attempted suicide only to discover that Maher, an amateur composing “an opera without music,” knew his dead mother. She was “the first woman to give [Maher] a number of sleepless nights.” Intrigued by the stranger’s memories, Regan begins rendezvousing with him regularly. The third character anchoring this peculiar milieu is Yelena, a Polish woman he thinks of as his girlfriend despite her insistence that they have no relationship. For her, he signs his name to countless documents he doesn’t understand, perhaps because “the Irishman loves his girlfriend best, his wife the most, but his mother the longest.”
A dark romp featuring delightfully crackling dialogue and the mental gymnastics of a protagonist so on edge he tries to silence a yowling cat with poison.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-84840-364-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: New Island Books/Dufour
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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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