Cooper (Closer, ) specializes in graphic forays into the punk/gay subculture of pornographic sex and mad-slasher violence. To justify such indulgence, he layers the narrative with references to Sade and Genet, his patron saints—but his latest, about a narrator obsessed with fantasies of sexual mutilation, fails to transform voyeurism into art, despite its pretensions. Narrator ``Dennis'' is fixated on death and sex, especially when the two are combined as a way to gain esoteric knowledge. While AIDS has made it more difficult here to romanticize death in that way, Cooper assembles his usual assortment of fetishes, embodied in such characters as Julian (``as far as I'm concerned, love's what you feel for someone you don't know very well, if at all''); Julian's kid brother Kevin (``a Julian replica, only shorter, and sort of too pretty''); and Henry (``Sometimes...I wish I could just sort of temporarily die''). Cooper on one level paints a grotesque, effective portrait of disaffected and marginalized homosexuals, but he overplays his hand so garishly that much of this reads like self-parody or black humor, depending on your tastes. At any rate, it comes to a finish in Holland, where Dennis has gone to live, writing back to Julian about men and boys he has murdered in a series of ritualistic killings. But Julian, fascinated, arrives with Kevin only to discover that it's all a figment of Dennis's imagination. On the train, Julian is left with pleasant memories of Dennis—not ``the psychotic me, but the teenager gazing purposefully into the holes in boys' bodies.'' Only Cooper's ability to get away with murder saves this from being a total put-on, for at least he does offer a sober glimpse of aimless dissipated lives. It's too bad that his conventional pseudo-clinical treatment of such lives is more jaded and monotonous than revelatory.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8021-1399-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
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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