A sometimes-tedious catalog of sociopolitical grievances.
A year after 9/11, agitation and activism take center stage in Southern California in Lefer's latest novel (The Fiery Alphabet, 2013, etc.).
When a jittery security guard blows off her ear in a health-food store, Rae receives an auricular prosthesis, pays off her debts from her settlement, and decides to take a year off from teaching high school English to become a research volunteer at the Los Angeles Zoo. In this conversational novel, Rae often addresses the reader directly: “I’m throwing a lot at you all at once.” And she does: Rae, alongside her best friend, Jennie Kim, and the members of the street activist troupe known as the Gorilla Theater, protests everything from the treatment of baboons at the zoo to the war in Iraq to the requirement that Iranian-born men in the U.S. register with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Rae admits: “We were fighting on too many fronts.” But Lefer never divulges the source or sources behind Rae’s fervent and frequent outrage. It's only when Rae contemplates her failed marriage to her alcoholic husband that the author offers a poignant, more complex understanding of her character. “Toward the end and in the aftermath of my marriage, see, when you love someone who’s a drunk, all kinds of things happen to your life. It goes beyond the ravages of the disease, beyond the grief and shame over the terrible thing he’s done—which you surely feel more keenly than he does….There’s the hurt and helplessness you feel all the time.” Glimpses of Rae’s inner turmoil, though sporadic, evince a far more compelling storyline than her quest to solve the problems of the world.
A sometimes-tedious catalog of sociopolitical grievances.Pub Date: April 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-937677-96-1
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Fomite
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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
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
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