by Dominic Knight ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 2, 2010
A light-hearted celebration of things uncool.
Australian TV writer Knight, a founder of comedy troupe The Chaser, abandons hard satire for softer emotions in his affectionate debut about a beta male finding his way.
Some youths rush headlong into adulthood, but Paul Johnson, 25, is determined to drag his feet. After graduating from law school (to the delight of his hipster parents), Paul chooses another path in life more from apathy than resolution. He makes his living as a DJ in and around Sydney, flogging wedding parties with the most cringe-inducing pop standards. “My skills wouldn’t have helped me in a pumping superclub on the fair island of Ibiza, but…give me two CD players and a box of greatest hits compilations, and I could pump up the jam, pump it up, while your feet are stomping,” says Paul. He genuinely loves music and has a talent for making it. But he’s starting to experience the embarrassment of an elongated adolescence, largely due to mockery from his good mate Nige and his best friend, the elusive and lovely Zoë. The sexual politics are lad-lit as usual: Paul beds a young companion mostly to aggravate her obnoxious older brother while he pines away for Felicity, a fellow attorney. “I was stuck, as New Order would have put it, in a bizarre love triangle—and one set to a tacky soundtrack,” Paul admits. But it’s the soundtrack and sincerity that sets the book apart from more acerbic fare like Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. We love what we love, no matter how cheesy the objects of our affections. The story might be a little syrupy here and there, but it mostly hums along as a comic novel.
A light-hearted celebration of things uncool.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-74166-626-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bantam UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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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 J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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