Peter Blake is an architect who cares about the environment, and as a vegetarian who emphasizes sustainability in his...
Ashley’s debut novel tells the story of an idealist’s journey from criminal suspect to accepted messiah.
Peter Blake is an architect who cares about the environment, and as a vegetarian who emphasizes sustainability in his designs, he practices and preaches his beliefs. For his latest project, for example, he gives “instructive lectures to the workers about…the sustainable features he incorporated in the building.” One day, Peter finds himself mistakenly entangled in a double homicide on the construction site, and he becomes a wanted man. Forced to flee to a cabin in North Carolina, he hides while his trusted and lovely lawyer, Sofie, attempts to sort things out. Fortunately for Peter, his cabin is designed with the same environmental fastidiousness as his bigger projects: “Why pay for heat when the sun supplies far more than he ever needed, even in winter?” he reflects. Meanwhile, a fierce gentleman named Boris is attempting to track Peter down; he’s as skilled at investigation as Peter is at architecture, and he seems sure to get his man. Then the unexpected happens: After Peter leaves his woodsy hideaway, he emerges in a nearby church, where the churchgoers believe him to be the second coming of Christ. Seeing a rare opportunity for redemption, as well as a platform to preach his own sort of gospel, Peter becomes “The Man They Call Jesus.” He offers his seven principles to the world (the Fifth Principle, for example, is “Democracy, not Tyranny”). Peter must figure out how to survive in environments that are either accepting or hostile toward his message. The novel is slowed down at times by unenlightening details, such as when Sofie notes that a building’s “design uses as many plants as possible because plants absorb carbon dioxide and also give off life-supporting oxygen.” That said, the story does manage moments of great excitement: Will Peter really manage to convince people his message is worthwhile, and also avoid the aggressive Boris? Although some of Peter’s seven principles may strike some readers as obvious (“Almost no country on earth has all the natural resources it needs”), those intrigued by a TED-talking messiah will be eager to find out his fate.Pub Date: July 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496102621
Page Count: 548
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2014
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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