Southern radio personality Keith's first novel, the story of a college football player, makes some charming feints and rolls, but fumbles the ball for a loss in yardage. Corinthians Phillipians McKay is born in Tallapoosa, Georgia, sometime between the 29th and 30th of September; the doctor flips a coin to determine his date of birth. This coin toss resonates as a young C.P. receives two gifts he refuses to decide between: a football and a set of encyclopedias. He memorizes the books one by one and plays with the football in a yard that ends with a sheer drop off a cliffthe spot from which his mother tosses teenage C.P.'s Down's Syndrome infant brother ``to the angels.'' On the same day, C.P. stands up to his alcoholic gambler father, skulling him with volume 11 of the Book of Knowledge. As C.P. grows, he exhibits immense prowess as a defensive back, a writer, and poet. Recruited by a number of schools, he eventually falls for the beguiling con of coach Tad Rankin at Sparta University. The novel's energetic prose shines in the Sparta football sequences, and C.P. makes some wonderful moves on the fieldand a few off, with fellow classmate Maggie Vinyardthat will have the adolescent in most readers cheering. But Maggie is not the only one who wants something from C.P.: His literature professor wants to sleep with him; his father, still gambling, wants the inside track on the games; Sparta's president saddles him with the university's financial future, Rankin with the team's bowl game future; and a cartoonishly sinister bookie threatens the lack of any future at all. Ultimately, C.P. bows to none of this pressure, foolishly believing that he controls his own destiny. The football sequences in this novel as are good as any written, but a clumsy start and a wincingly bad end leave the book buried deep in its own end zone.
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13497-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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