by D.L. Flusfeder ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1993
A virtuoso double biography (though Tierney comes across as more interesting than his legendary subject) weak on...
The teasing title's not the last touch of bravado in this knowing, nervy first novel—a story chronicling unemployed author Richard Tierney's exploration of the life of British aesthete/adventurer William Ivory after Boston British publisher Dorothy Burton cajoles him into writing a biography of this ``monster.''
Checking into his posh London hotel on Dorothy's advance is only the first step in Tierney's descent into a comic-book hell. Ivory's obituarist Roland Gibbs turns out to be wrong about all the important facts of his subject's life; Ivory's first wife, Helen, whom he never bothered to divorce, stutters through conversations with a jog-trot rhythm courtesy of Parkinson's disease; Nicholas Wheel and Julian Brougham Calder, the two men who answer Tierney's ad for information, are a seedy bar-pianist and a vindictive old drunk who holds court in a tavern called Cunty's. As he follows up hints of Ivory's wide-ranging vices—his resolute immersion in decadence, his fascination with suicide (the cognate cases of Chatterton, Kleist and especially Mishima are duly trotted out), his domination of Helen, his Euro-wannabe Japanese second wife, Reiko, and Lizzie Sharp, the suicidal stripper who displaced her—Tierney (``I hadn't had to deal with an ethical question since I was in college'') finds himself merging with his subject, fleeing his hotel with unpaid bills, moving in with Helen, identifying Dorothy as Ivory's daughter, injecting his own memories and frustrations into the few passages of his book he's able to finish, and leaving his own book behind in his growing obsession to discover the whereabouts of Ivory's manuscript for Last Things and the manner of his mysterious death.
A virtuoso double biography (though Tierney comes across as more interesting than his legendary subject) weak on plot—the promised revelations come as no surprise—but strongly evocative of the biographer's febrile infatuation.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-374-20162-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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