Persistently engrossing tales even at their grimmest.
Characters experience loss and death and suffer isolation and insomnia in this bleak collection of flash fiction and short stories.
Readers should get a sense of the author’s subversion of genre with the opening story, “The City That Bleeds”: it’s a mere three sentences. Most of the tales are of the literary variety and tend to focus on emotion over plot. In “North Vermont and Lexington,” for example, a man’s post-college life begins on a plane bound for LA, where he meets fellow history major Andrea. Their mutual dreams of California may be diminished by the realization that, upon reaching their destination, anxiousness and hopelessness will remain. Other stories are equally fatalistic: a man’s serious (unspecified) illness may be too much for the woman he loves (“It Rained”), while an unfamiliar passer-by upsets the delicate balance of the idyllic neighborhood of “In Strides.” Hefty doses of somberness, however, aren’t off-putting. There’s a rhythm to LaValley’s (Despumation, 2016, etc.) book, starting with its structure: two microshorts, a short story, repeat. Likewise, recurring settings or predicaments link the tales literally and metaphorically. Cold winters chill characters in the same way as a disinterested lover (“Winter in Season”); others take long, sometimes-aimless drives alone, perfectly suited to an insomniac loner (“Sleeper’s Compass”). LaValley’s prose is uncompromising but lyrical: a character sees honesty in dilapidated homes, the outside “not hidden in a fake smile behind whitened teeth.” But it’s not all gloom. The author, for one, toys with expectations: the preachy, titular “Travelin Man” predicts an unusual doomsday event; and it’s difficult not to ruminate on the mysterious but miraculous tonic in “The Secrets of Dr. Sortelli.” There are also instances of buoyancy. At first glance, “Sand Bucket” is dire, a father’s apparent eulogy for his son Chris. But the story of a boy incessantly carrying and conversing with a bucketful of sand, like an imaginary friend, has a positive message of being oneself despite what others think.
Persistently engrossing tales even at their grimmest.Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944044-39-8
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Sinister Grin Press
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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