More transgressive meanderings from shock jock Cooper (Try, 1994, etc.), who seems—as far as the dance of death is concerned- -to have all the steps down pat without the first clue of where he wants to go with them. ``Luke at Scott's. Mason's home jerking off to a picture of Smear's bassist, Alex. . . Robert, Tracy, and Chris are several miles across town shooting dope. . . Pam's directing a porn film. Goof is the star. He's twelve and a half. I'm home playing records and writing a novel about the aforementioned people, especially Luke. This is it.'' In its very first lines, the story is laid out pretty clearly. Like most of Cooper's previous works, this is an account of life among the addicts and prostitutes of the gay urban demimonde, this time in Los Angeles. The narrator is a novelist and magazine reporter who comes into contact with a clique of teenaged hustlers while working on an article about AIDS among the runaways and drifters of West Hollywood, but from his descriptions of his daily routines one could suppose that he had grown up in Covenant House himself: ``All the beauty in my life is either sleeping, unconscious, or dead.'' And how: When he and his friends aren't shooting up or having sex on camera, they are usually fantasizing about killing or being killed. Goof, for example, ODs during a porn shoot. Then Drew gets knocked out cold when someone whacks him with a skateboard during a bit of rough sex. The narrator dreams of eviscerating people from time to time and seems to be obsessed with a very young streetwalker named Sniffles, who likes to be beaten up in bed. After a while he tracks Sniffles down to the AIDS hospice where he's dying. When he gets home, he finds that Drew may in fact be dead. He sits down to finish his novel. As offensive in its aimlessness as it is in its perversity. Cooper should be ashamed of himself.
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8021-1608-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
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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