Begins with promise, but characters are reduced to clichés by overly simplistic conflicts.
A federal antipoverty worker finds his job on the line with the arrival of a new boss.
Michael Napolitano works as at the Survival Center, a service agency that provides food and goods to local low-income families in rural Massachusetts. Despite earning wages so low that he jokingly refers to himself as a volunteer, Napolitano enjoys his job and finds the work rewarding. With the arrival of new executive director Mr. Prince, however, Napolitano soon discovers an ugly side of the nonprofit world. In addition to being completely ambivalent to the center’s philanthropic goals, Prince reeks of cheap cologne and eagerly throws around racial slurs. When Prince refuses to give bread to an elderly woman who arrives after the official closing time, the situation sparks a heated confrontation between Prince and Napolitano that ultimately leads to the director firing Napolitano. Shocked by his rapid dismissal, Napolitano struggles to maintain normalcy by starting a new job, discussing politics with his friends and pursuing an unlikely romance with a beautiful woman. Finally he seeks the advice of Sarah, the beloved former director at the center, and discovers a nefarious secret about Prince’s past. While the book accurately depicts the disparities that can arise between nonprofit workers and the bureaucrats financing them, it reduces these characters to two-dimensional caricatures. As a sarcastic Italian-American with a stutter and a soft spot for doughnuts, Napolitano makes for a likable hero, but his inability to communicate reasonably with bosses and board members he dislikes is unrealistic and would result in any employee being fired. Similarly, the book contains cartoonishly evil villains who seem bent on closing or relocating the center for no apparent reason. By the time Napolitano enlists the help of a cowboy from the West Coast to rough up the director and restore order to the center, readers will have already drifted from the increasingly ridiculous plot.
Begins with promise, but characters are reduced to clichés by overly simplistic conflicts.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2010
ISBN: 978-1452812427
Page Count: 162
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2011
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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