An engaging novel that will particularly appeal to veterans, readers in recovery, and young people searching for more secure...
In Jones’ debut novel, a wayward, alcoholic 20-something on the Jersey Shore tries to turn his life around after getting arrested.
Tony Joppa grew up in affluent Colts Neck, New Jersey, but two years after graduating from college, he’s living on the nearby shore with a friend, drinking way too much, and working at his family’s pizza place. He wants to have a higher standard of living, but he doesn’t like the idea of an office job. His life delivering pizzas at Skinny Vinnie’s leaves a lot to be desired, but one St. Patrick’s Day, it gets worse: He gets busted for driving drunk during a pizza delivery—a delivery that also included a bag of marijuana. Tony’s connected Uncle New works out a deal in which Tony will live at a halfway house, perform community service, and join the U.S. Navy for three years. Tony moves into the halfway house (called “the Last House on the Block”), joins Alcoholics Anonymous, and begins his recovery program. The house is home to a nice collection of warm but tough misfits whom Tony generally likes; his new AA sponsor says to him, “So, Tony, do you admit that you have been a complete douchebag?” Months pass, full of meetings, meditation, and new friends; eventually, he heads west to start his military service but not before a last (sober) hurrah in Las Vegas. Overall, Jones’ concise novel offers readers an engaging and fast-paced tale. Over the course of the story, the author does a very nice job of showing how the protagonist, a troubled but generally levelheaded young person, embraces an entirely new social universe in order to move forward in life. Stories about the AA experience and about military life are not uncommon, but Jones gives his narrative some originality with a no-nonsense New Jersey atmosphere and witty characters, and Tony is refreshingly self-aware as he faces different challenges. The ending comes a bit suddenly, but the protagonist’s candid voice remains enjoyable throughout.
An engaging novel that will particularly appeal to veterans, readers in recovery, and young people searching for more secure futures.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-946005-25-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Hawkeye Publishers
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
